Dear Ludic Liberators,
What games do you play with attention? How about any of these?
Clearing Out a Space for Us to Have a Fully Present Interaction Game
Observe Myself from Above Game
Background Everything Else so I can Focus on this One Thing Game
Be Uninteresting so as to Prevent you from Paying Any Extra Attention To Me Game
Break The Script so You Pay Attention to Meeeee Game
Making it Look like I’m Really Really Visibly Paying Attention to You Game
Only Paying Attention to You so I Can Use You for Fiction Material Game
Hmm… :)
Attention is full of tricks, isn’t it? Something we realized in this month’s Lab is that it’s certainly not neutral or objective. Our attentional instruments are biased. Even when our attention’s quality is spacious, relaxed, patient, and allowing, it can’t help but exclude, spotlight, project, and transform. Attention is not simply an act of receiving information. It is a continuous manipulation of it — a process of filtering.
The games we played at the Lab invited us to tune the knobs of attentional intensity. We gave unusual forms of attention to our surrounding environments, to ordinary objects, to our bodies’ interiors, and then to one another. We ran out of time before we could play with giving new forms of attention to our thoughts & feelings (ATTENTION LAB part II might be in order!), but we learned a lot from the foundational experiments. We discovered that everything, even an elastic band or a pen, can be SEXY when attended to with an eye for potential sexiness, or DANGEROUS or TENDER when looking for those qualities within them. Our attention made it so! Our shared, collective attention refracted and amplified what we each saw. Our attention created reality.
We got a little scared when paying attention directly to each other, unmediated by any object between us. Having just explored the reality-shaping power of our attentional instruments, what were the stakes of inviting someone else’s full, honest, unscripted attention onto ourselves? If someone SAW and DECLARED us as Nervous or Eager or Confident we had to suddenly square that with our own perception of ourselves. Paradoxically, another’s attention could feel disorienting, destabilizing, dissonant to the attentional habits we apply to ourselves. Was attention actually a CONFRONTATION? we asked. An ATTACK of sorts?
After March’s Lab, the one during which we played with facial expressions and body language, I was left with a greater mistrust for my attention. I learned that it was anxious. It focused on evidence of my fears. And when my attention was pointed onto human faces — which are notoriously unrepresentative of internal feeling-states — it was certain to lead me astray. So this month I wanted to see if I can become friends with attention, to learn its tricks and play games with it that were more fun and liberating for both of us. In the process, I ended up creating a kind of preliminary taxonomy of attentional intensities. I present it to you now!
The two axes I propose that attention varies on is its speed (scanning, still, or stuck) and tension (relaxed or concentrated). It’s not a perfect taxonomy yet. For example, staring – a relaxed gaze that’s stuck on a point - is exclusively a visual process, whereas the other verbs on the list could be performed with alternative attentional instruments – e.g., you can witness something with your hearing, focus on an internal felt-sense, observe a taste, etc. I’m not sure if there’s a more sense-generic synonym for “staring”? Let me know if you think of one.
But having even these preliminary categories helps me imagine my attention as a complex instrument, a musical control board, a synthesizer. Each of the five senses as well as my mental sense and internal feeling-sense is a channel, but I can tweak the speed and tension of my attention to change the quality of the wave that comes in through it. I can amplify any of the channels or turn the volume all the way down on all but one. Although sometimes I can’t. Sometimes a certain attentional focus wants to come through uninvited despite my seeming curation and composition. Maybe it’s dominant in my external environment (like the sound of ambulance sirens) or is experienced as internally acute (like a persistent lower back ache I can’t ignore). In that case, I still have some power. I can apply a filter – to translate and distort the uninvited attentional channel into some other form I can work with.
A game I play with myself that illustrates this filtering principle is called Thoughts Without Words. It’s very simple but surprisingly effective. I play it when I’m trying to fall asleep but have an unstoppable stream of thought traffic coming in into my mind’s control room. When I try to tell myself to stop thinking, it doesn’t work — the stream is too powerful. So I make it a game. I say, Ok, Natalia, you can keep thinking these same thoughts, but you just can’t use words. The permission to allow the stream to still come in through the No-Words filter suddenly converts the thought-flow into loose, cloud-like images that immediately begin dispersing like smoke. Try playing this game yourself and see if it works for you! :)
I’m just remembering another interesting finding from this lab — realizing how much we have the capacity to attend not to just to the proliferating complexity of everything outside and inside of us, but also to what is absent. Perhaps I’ll need to account for that in my chart. Is that what missing is — a form of attention to an absence?
I’m not done with attention. I want to play with it more. In doing research for this lab, I found that quotes from countless spiritual teachers, artists, writers, inventors who all said some version of “attention is the most important thing.” Some went as to far as to suggest it is the only thing. I doubt that they just meant to encourage us to get off distracting social media platforms. There must be more. I want to find out. Will you join me?
Fill out this tiny survey to tell me if you might want to play some attention games if I run another lab. I might repeat some games but I also have several more that I want to try!!!!
Also, I’m looking for collaborators for future labs! Have you attended a lab or read a Lab Report and want the opportunity to lead your own playful experiments in relating? Do you already have a game you want to play-test or want to work together to make something new (I *adore* new opportunities to collab!)? Please fill out this other tiny survey if that sounds appealing to you. There’s almost nothing off limits because EVERYTHING CAN BE PLAYED WITH!
🗓 Don't miss any more labs! The Ludic Liberation Lab meets every 2nd Thursday of the month, 6-8:30pm Eastern Time, so add it to your calendar. WE'LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH ON JUNE 10th!
achingly attending to the space of your absence in my space of presence,
Natalia
Gamemaker/ Destroyer
Perhaps “transcending” for a sense-generic version of “staring”?
I had to meditate for a while on what “staring” even is, as it means two completely opposite things depending on where our focus lays. So for the stuck, relaxed kind of “staring”, physically we’re trained on a single point in space, but mentally our attention is so focused elsewhere we are no longer processing sensory data from our eyes. We can do that with our hearing, where we’re tuning out our surroundings. Our brains do it automatically with touch, smell, and taste, where it’ll stop processing the sensory signals if it’s receiving the same thing over and over and over again and will only alert you if there’s been a change. So stuck, relaxed attention seems to be more transcending of a sense by completely removing one’s attention from it.