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Attention Lab workshops are collective participatory experiments in the powers of human attention. Through group practices and guided discussions, we seek to understand what attention is, what it can do, and why it's worth protecting.

Urban space is defined by the human life, social interaction, and community experiences that happen within it rather than just its physical buildings. What lays the foundation for urban space as we perceive it?

Text: Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse

Date: Wednesday, September 16

Location: The Wharf, DC

If you are interested in joining the Washington DC mailing list, fill out this form.

ENROLL HERE!

On figure drawing as a mode of attention

Drawing isn't simply a language of representation; it's also a way of paying attention.

Through sustained observation and a series of practical exercises, we will explore how drawing can interrupt familiar ways of seeing and make room for a slower, more attentive, and more intuitive engagement with the world. Drawing allows us to look before we judge or interpret.

The course will focus especially on figure drawing and its complex relationship with the body, with particular attention to the female body. The history of visual representation is also a history of power: who is allowed to look, who becomes the object of the gaze, and how bodies are made visible—or reduced to objects. By examining the act of looking itself, we will consider whether drawing can help us question some of these inherited habits and develop a different relationship with the body. 

The seminar combines practical exercises with critical reflection. Its aim is not simply to produce a successful image, but to use drawing as a way of asking how we see, what we have been taught to see, and how we might begin to see differently.

Led by architect and educator Olímpia Solà Inaraja.

Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00pm

September 16-30

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.

Please see our Refund Policy HERE.

Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.

Image credit: Study of Angel's Hand for "Mercy's Dream" (1857) by Daniel Huntington. Original from The Smithsonian.

Fashion moves in seasons. A new collection drops every few weeks, whether we're ready or not. A flax plant keeps its own season, and it won't be rushed for anyone's calendar. This month we follow author Eve Schaub, who cleared out her vegetable garden and planted flax instead, trading a fast-fashion habit for a two-year apprenticeship in scutching, hackling, spinning, weaving, and sewing her own dress from seed to hem. We'll pair her story with the essay that first named this instinct: Kate Fletcher's 2007 call for "slow fashion," which argues that a fiber takes the same amount of time to grow no matter how fast a store shelf turns over — the clock was never really ours to speed up. What would it mean to give a piece of clothing the time it actually takes to make? And what do we lose when we don't?

Texts: Fio Geiran and Janaya Williams' "She Isn't Just Sewing a Dress. She's Growing One" (NPR, August 12, 2026) & Kate Fletcher's "Slow Fashion" (The Ecologist, June 2007)

Date: Saturday, September 19 at 2pm

Location: Edgewater Park with Aditi and Rob

If you are interested in joining the Cleveland, OH mailing list, fill out this form.

RSVP HERE!

Please join SoRA our inaugural fashion show featuring wearable pieces by Jianing Zhao, Nathalie San Fratello, Tanner Kok, Lexi Fujita, and Dennis RedMoon Darkeem, winning stylists from the School’s EYE-CATCH! open call. Each stylist will showcase four looks inspired by the aesthetics and counter-aesthetics of the Attention Economy, brought to life by twenty models as our Dumbo Sanctuary transforms into a runway. 

In addition to the runway, the fashion show will invite audiences to an attentional score designed in conversation with sartorial traditions, to be activated by audience members during the fashion show. The runway will be followed by an afterparty with light refreshments and DJ set by Simisola. Limited-edition upcycled merch with screen printed designs and a digicam photo zone will be open throughout the evening to enjoy!

Please note that if you arrive after 6:20pm, the doors will close in order to minimize disruption during the runway. If you arrive late, please text us at (646) 526-9412.

The audience area during the runway will be a mixture of seating and standing, assigned on a first-come first-serve basis. If you have accessibility concerns, please feel free to email us at strotherschool@sustainedattention.net and we will accommodate you. 

Where does color come from? In her 2016 book The Secret Lives of Color, Kassia St. Clair deepens our understanding of color by delving into the histories of dozens of pigments and dyes. Through her detailed research, St. Clair reminds us not to take color for granted, revealing the surprisingly arduous means by which colors– such as Ultramarine blue and Tyrian Purple– were originally sourced, and how these hues come to hold meaning. We’ll be following St. Clair’s lead as we consider through the lens of science, myth, and history in downtown Menlo Park.

Text: The Secret Lives of Color Kassia St. Clair
Date: September 22nd, 6 PM-8 PM
Location: Fremont Park, Menlo Park CA

If you are interested in joining the Silicon Valley, CA mailing list, fill out this form.

ENROLL HERE!

On the social construction of trash

If you place attention on something, does it stop being trash? Is there waste only where there's no attention?

This seminar takes that question and gets our hands dirty with it. Drawing on geographer Vinay Gidwani's work on India's "waste-value dialectic," alongside artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles's Maintenance Artist and its insistence that unseen labor deserves witness, we'll build our own practice of sustained, unglamorous noticing. Students will keep a waste log, transform a piece of their own discarded material by hand into dye, into stock, and into structure. We'll close the course with a group exhibition built entirely from what got reclaimed.

The seminar also draws on fieldwork from Bangalore's construction-waste economy (Baka, Doherty, Butt) and returns often to Dante, whose Inferno remains one of literature's oldest arguments that waste is a location, not a substance. We will ask: is there really an “away” to throw things to? By the end, we will have a richer, more flexible and personal relationship to what we discard.

Led by Shivani Lakshmi Aysola, founding principal of Shamba-la Studios and author of Dialectics of Debris, a study of Bangalore's construction waste landscape.

Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00pm

September 22-October 6

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.

Please see our Refund Policy HERE.

Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.

Photo by Kai Pro

The concept of ‘cool’ is foundational to contemporary fashion and one of America’s great cultural signifiers. Coolness also, according to the scholar Robert Farris Thompson, arrived in America from related concepts in many cultures across West Africa and the African diaspora. What kinds of decisions do people make to seek out this ever-elusive ideal? What exactly does coolness communicate? Where does the concept even come from? 

In this study we’ll examine how taking an Afro-diasporic view of coolness can help us understand how cool people present themselves, why so many people want to be cool, and how coolness can be understood as “a symbolically generous aesthetic organization of social reality”.

Text:  Robert Farris Thompson’s “An Introduction to Transatlantic Black Art History” 

Date: Saturday, September 26 @ 2pm

Location: Chelsea with Nicholas & Connor

On figure drawing as a mode of attention

Drawing isn't simply a language of representation; it's also a way of paying attention.

Through sustained observation and a series of practical exercises, we will explore how drawing can interrupt familiar ways of seeing and make room for a slower, more attentive, and more intuitive engagement with the world. Drawing allows us to look before we judge or interpret.

The course will focus especially on figure drawing and its complex relationship with the body, with particular attention to the female body. The history of visual representation is also a history of power: who is allowed to look, who becomes the object of the gaze, and how bodies are made visible—or reduced to objects. By examining the act of looking itself, we will consider whether drawing can help us question some of these inherited habits and develop a different relationship with the body. 

The seminar combines practical exercises with critical reflection. Its aim is not simply to produce a successful image, but to use drawing as a way of asking how we see, what we have been taught to see, and how we might begin to see differently.

Led by architect and educator Olímpia Solà Inaraja.

Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00pm

September 16-30

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.

Please see our Refund Policy HERE.

Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.

Image credit: Study of Angel's Hand for "Mercy's Dream" (1857) by Daniel Huntington. Original from The Smithsonian.

Mrs. Dalloway’s poignant reflection on middle age, interior worlds, and mental health has had staying power for more than a century. We follow a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares for a party and reflects on the choices she’s made . . . and the ones she’s let drift too far from her. 

Choosing to mend “a favourite dress” to wear to the party becomes an act of reflection and care but one that’s also marked by distraction and insecurity. What can be fixed and who can fix it? What is better left unmended and unexamined?   

Text: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

Date: Thursday, September 24 at 6:30pm Central

Location: South City with Chris and Michelle

If you are interested in joining the St. Louis, MO mailing list, fill out this form.

SIGN UP HERE!

Attention Lab workshops are collective participatory experiments in the powers of human attention. Through group practices and guided discussions, we seek to understand what attention is, what it can do, and why it's worth protecting.

We take for granted the practice of clothing our bodies, and most attempts to theorize this practice emerge from social science, psychology, or marketing research. But what if those shoes want to be on your feet as much as you want to wear them? What if our clothing “choices” convey less a decision that is made by us, and rather a relationship that unfolds between us and our garments? 

Looking through the lens of Affect Studies (or "non-representational theory”), this Study will consider how identity is affected (!) when we include clothing in the “assemblage” of our bodies.

Text: By Lucia Ruggerone’s The Feeling of Being Dressed: Affect Studies and the Clothed Body

Date: Saturday, September 26, 2026

Location: Chelsea with Miranda & Eleanor

We move through the world dressed — every day, without much thought, we make dozens of small decisions about how visible we want to be. What to wear on top, what to leave off, what to match and what to let clash. Most of these choices happen so automatically we don't register them as choices at all.

Georg Simmel, writing in 1904, noticed something quietly radical about this: clothing isn't just self-expression. It's a way of managing attention itself — how much of it we want, how much we can bear, and where the line falls between disappearing into a crowd and standing apart from it. He wrote that following convention makes us invisible — "its acceptance by any one individual does not call attention to him" — while even a small departure from it is "immediately noticed." Attention, in other words, isn't something that just happens to us. We're constantly, quietly negotiating for it, or negotiating our way out of it 

Text: FASHION, Georg Simmel 1904

Date: Sunday, September 27 at 2pm

Location: Ames Family Atrium at the Cleveland Museum of Art  with Aditi & Rob

If you are interested in joining the Cleveland, OH mailing list, fill out this form.

Long before Bill Cunningham became famous for photographing street style in New York, he was already an obsessive student of how people dress. A milliner, collector, and lifelong observer, Cunningham delighted in the unexpected combinations, small details, and personal inventions through which people made fashion their own.

Taking inspiration from Cunningham’s joyful and idiosyncratic way of seeing, we’ll turn the Guadalupe Vintage Market into a field of observation. Among its racks, objects, and outfits, we’ll practice noticing what makes something stylish, surprising, peculiar, beautiful, or entirely its own. Perhaps personal style begins not with knowing what to wear, but with learning how to look.

Text: Bill Cunningham’s Fashion Climbing: A Memoir with Photographs

Date: Sunday, September 27, 2026

Location: Guadalupe Vintage Market, Austin

If you are interested in joining the Austin, TX mailing list, fill out this form.

Text: Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror 

Date: Sunday, September 27

Location: CityCenter, DC

If you are interested in joining the Washington DC mailing list, fill out this form.

ENROLL HERE!

On using the attention frackers’ tools against them

For thirty years, customizing your interface to the internet meant knowing how to write code, and the people who designed the UX and algorithms that define social media feeds had the only vote that counted. Now, through "vibe coding," someone with no engineering background can put a working tool into the world in an afternoon. What opportunities does this shift present? Is the early-web dream of “fixing the internet” now feasible? How wary should we be of these tools, seeing as they are constructed by the attention frackers themselves?

We will read across the media thinkers who saw this coming, from Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman through Zeynep Tufekci, and we take up Jaron Lanier's argument for data dignity alongside the current case for federated social media and middleware.

We will also build. As a group, we’ll construct wrappers around the most exploitative platforms we use: interfaces that replace the algorithmic Skinner box of platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube with something that empowers us with more intentional choice. As we do so, we will critically examine the quandary of using the master’s tools on the master’s house. Culture jamming has always worked on borrowed infrastructure, and the infrastructure has never been this borrowable (though we might break some terms of service)! 

No coding experience required. That is the whole point.

Led by Brian Rosen, longtime Pixar technologist and now a research scientist at Google X, The Moonshot Factory.

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.

Please see our Refund Policy HERE.

Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.

Photo by Andre Moura

On the social construction of trash

If you place attention on something, does it stop being trash? Is there waste only where there's no attention?

This seminar takes that question and gets our hands dirty with it. Drawing on geographer Vinay Gidwani's work on India's "waste-value dialectic," alongside artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles's Maintenance Artist and its insistence that unseen labor deserves witness, we'll build our own practice of sustained, unglamorous noticing. Students will keep a waste log, transform a piece of their own discarded material by hand into dye, into stock, and into structure. We'll close the course with a group exhibition built entirely from what got reclaimed.

The seminar also draws on fieldwork from Bangalore's construction-waste economy (Baka, Doherty, Butt) and returns often to Dante, whose Inferno remains one of literature's oldest arguments that waste is a location, not a substance. We will ask: is there really an “away” to throw things to? By the end, we will have a richer, more flexible and personal relationship to what we discard.

Led by Shivani Lakshmi Aysola, founding principal of Shamba-la Studios and author of Dialectics of Debris, a study of Bangalore's construction waste landscape.

Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00pm

September 22-October 6

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.

Please see our Refund Policy HERE.

Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.

Photo by Kai Pro

SIGN UP HERE!

In 1920s Harlem, the “stroll” — a slow, deliberate procession of self-display — was meant to announce one’s arrival and presence within the community. Denied access to indoor space, Black New Yorkers turned city streets into stages, each outfit and gait a declaration of dignity in a city designed to deny it. What began as “defiant performances of freedom, dignity, self-worth, and cultural syncretism” over time became less a performance for the white gaze than a gift exchanged within the community.

Join us on the once-strolled streets of Harlem to trace the politics of dandyism, Black aesthetic modernism, and how walking, watching, and being seen could constitute a culture. Perhaps we may once again make the sidewalk sanctified ground…

Text: Monica L. Miller’s Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity

Date: Tuesday, September 29 at 7pm

Location: Harlem with Lindsee & Katie

On figure drawing as a mode of attention

Drawing isn't simply a language of representation; it's also a way of paying attention.

Through sustained observation and a series of practical exercises, we will explore how drawing can interrupt familiar ways of seeing and make room for a slower, more attentive, and more intuitive engagement with the world. Drawing allows us to look before we judge or interpret.

The course will focus especially on figure drawing and its complex relationship with the body, with particular attention to the female body. The history of visual representation is also a history of power: who is allowed to look, who becomes the object of the gaze, and how bodies are made visible—or reduced to objects. By examining the act of looking itself, we will consider whether drawing can help us question some of these inherited habits and develop a different relationship with the body. 

The seminar combines practical exercises with critical reflection. Its aim is not simply to produce a successful image, but to use drawing as a way of asking how we see, what we have been taught to see, and how we might begin to see differently.

Led by architect and educator Olímpia Solà Inaraja.

Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00pm

September 16-30

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.

Please see our Refund Policy HERE.

Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.

Image credit: Study of Angel's Hand for "Mercy's Dream" (1857) by Daniel Huntington. Original from The Smithsonian.

SIGN UP HERE!

Attention Lab workshops are collective participatory experiments in the powers of human attention. Through group practices and guided discussions, we seek to understand what attention is, what it can do, and why it's worth protecting.

On using the attention frackers’ tools against them

For thirty years, customizing your interface to the internet meant knowing how to write code, and the people who designed the UX and algorithms that define social media feeds had the only vote that counted. Now, through "vibe coding," someone with no engineering background can put a working tool into the world in an afternoon. What opportunities does this shift present? Is the early-web dream of “fixing the internet” now feasible? How wary should we be of these tools, seeing as they are constructed by the attention frackers themselves?

We will read across the media thinkers who saw this coming, from Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman through Zeynep Tufekci, and we take up Jaron Lanier's argument for data dignity alongside the current case for federated social media and middleware.

We will also build. As a group, we’ll construct wrappers around the most exploitative platforms we use: interfaces that replace the algorithmic Skinner box of platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube with something that empowers us with more intentional choice. As we do so, we will critically examine the quandary of using the master’s tools on the master’s house. Culture jamming has always worked on borrowed infrastructure, and the infrastructure has never been this borrowable (though we might break some terms of service)! 

No coding experience required. That is the whole point.

Led by Brian Rosen, longtime Pixar technologist and now a research scientist at Google X, The Moonshot Factory.

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.

Please see our Refund Policy HERE.

Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.

Photo by Andre Moura

On the social construction of trash

If you place attention on something, does it stop being trash? Is there waste only where there's no attention?

This seminar takes that question and gets our hands dirty with it. Drawing on geographer Vinay Gidwani's work on India's "waste-value dialectic," alongside artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles's Maintenance Artist and its insistence that unseen labor deserves witness, we'll build our own practice of sustained, unglamorous noticing. Students will keep a waste log, transform a piece of their own discarded material by hand into dye, into stock, and into structure. We'll close the course with a group exhibition built entirely from what got reclaimed.

The seminar also draws on fieldwork from Bangalore's construction-waste economy (Baka, Doherty, Butt) and returns often to Dante, whose Inferno remains one of literature's oldest arguments that waste is a location, not a substance. We will ask: is there really an “away” to throw things to? By the end, we will have a richer, more flexible and personal relationship to what we discard.

Led by Shivani Lakshmi Aysola, founding principal of Shamba-la Studios and author of Dialectics of Debris, a study of Bangalore's construction waste landscape.

Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00pm

September 22-October 6

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.

Please see our Refund Policy HERE.

Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.

Photo by Kai Pro

ENROLL HERE!

A closer look into miniature worlds

There is an invisible world awaiting our attention: the world of the very small. 

In this course, we will take a closer look at everyday objects through microscopes and macro lenses to bear witness to a surprisingly structured world only non-humans can ordinarily see. We will explore the anatomy of plants, the mouths they breathe through (stomata), and the architecture they construct for pollinators. We will look at humanmade objects and notice how color, texture, and the felt sense of our surroundings change with scale. We will view the rich ecosystem of a drop of pond water and see life forms ranging from the monstrous to the surprisingly cute.

Our discussions and reflections will take us through the aesthetics of Kobayashi Issa, Voltaire’s science fiction, the relational ecology of Robin Wall Kimmerer, the investigative wonder of Annie Dillard, and more.

By the end of this seminar, our attention to detail in the marginal and mundane will expand and widen the possibilities of our vision. We will leave with the ability to shift the scale of our attention and deepen our capacity to notice (and enter) these ever-present infinitesimal worlds.

Led by Renee Bell, assistant professor of mathematics at Lehman College.

Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00pm

October 7-21

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.

Please see our Refund Policy HERE.

Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.

SIGN UP HERE!

Attention Lab workshops are collective participatory experiments in the powers of human attention. Through group practices and guided discussions, we seek to understand what attention is, what it can do, and why it's worth protecting.

We're in a crisis of imagination...we need new visions for the future that we want to move towards (rather than the dystopias we want to avoid).

On using the attention frackers’ tools against them

For thirty years, customizing your interface to the internet meant knowing how to write code, and the people who designed the UX and algorithms that define social media feeds had the only vote that counted. Now, through "vibe coding," someone with no engineering background can put a working tool into the world in an afternoon. What opportunities does this shift present? Is the early-web dream of “fixing the internet” now feasible? How wary should we be of these tools, seeing as they are constructed by the attention frackers themselves?

We will read across the media thinkers who saw this coming, from Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman through Zeynep Tufekci, and we take up Jaron Lanier's argument for data dignity alongside the current case for federated social media and middleware.

We will also build. As a group, we’ll construct wrappers around the most exploitative platforms we use: interfaces that replace the algorithmic Skinner box of platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube with something that empowers us with more intentional choice. As we do so, we will critically examine the quandary of using the master’s tools on the master’s house. Culture jamming has always worked on borrowed infrastructure, and the infrastructure has never been this borrowable (though we might break some terms of service)! 

No coding experience required. That is the whole point.

Led by Brian Rosen, longtime Pixar technologist and now a research scientist at Google X, The Moonshot Factory.

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.

Please see our Refund Policy HERE.

Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.

Photo by Andre Moura

A closer look into miniature worlds

There is an invisible world awaiting our attention: the world of the very small. 

In this course, we will take a closer look at everyday objects through microscopes and macro lenses to bear witness to a surprisingly structured world only non-humans can ordinarily see. We will explore the anatomy of plants, the mouths they breathe through (stomata), and the architecture they construct for pollinators. We will look at humanmade objects and notice how color, texture, and the felt sense of our surroundings change with scale. We will view the rich ecosystem of a drop of pond water and see life forms ranging from the monstrous to the surprisingly cute.

Our discussions and reflections will take us through the aesthetics of Kobayashi Issa, Voltaire’s science fiction, the relational ecology of Robin Wall Kimmerer, the investigative wonder of Annie Dillard, and more.

By the end of this seminar, our attention to detail in the marginal and mundane will expand and widen the possibilities of our vision. We will leave with the ability to shift the scale of our attention and deepen our capacity to notice (and enter) these ever-present infinitesimal worlds.

Led by Renee Bell, assistant professor of mathematics at Lehman College.

Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00pm

October 7-21

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.

Please see our Refund Policy HERE.

Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.

ENROLL HERE!

On the spatial politics of the flash mob

From novel, to viral, to commercial, to cringe: the life cycle of the flash mob, an internet trend that got people off the internet to gather in physical space. Now, fifteen years past its cultural peak, we have enough distance to study the flash mob as a social phenomenon, organizing practice, and art form.  

What can we understand about culture, virality, and public performance by tracking the history and transformation of the flash mob? From the proliferation of interventionist public performance art in the 20th century to the internet’s creation of “smart mobs” to the specific conditions of virality in the mid 2010s and its relationship to commercialism, we will begin to see flash mobs as an action with real cultural and social organizing potential. 

We will also study the formal ingredients of the flash mob — instantaneous and often joyful synchronized behaviors performed briefly in a public space — and the way this mode of shared experience has been shaped by advances in technology. Together, we will think through the liberatory and resistance-oriented cultural potential that may be discovered in this form. Is it possible to reclaim this "viral" mode of gathering for something greater than likes and reshares? 

Led by interdisciplinary theatre artist and educator Sheridan Merrick.

Thursdays, 6:30-9:00pm

October 15-29

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.

Please see our Refund Policy HERE.

Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.

Photo by Morteza Akhnia

A closer look into miniature worlds

There is an invisible world awaiting our attention: the world of the very small. 

In this course, we will take a closer look at everyday objects through microscopes and macro lenses to bear witness to a surprisingly structured world only non-humans can ordinarily see. We will explore the anatomy of plants, the mouths they breathe through (stomata), and the architecture they construct for pollinators. We will look at humanmade objects and notice how color, texture, and the felt sense of our surroundings change with scale. We will view the rich ecosystem of a drop of pond water and see life forms ranging from the monstrous to the surprisingly cute.

Our discussions and reflections will take us through the aesthetics of Kobayashi Issa, Voltaire’s science fiction, the relational ecology of Robin Wall Kimmerer, the investigative wonder of Annie Dillard, and more.

By the end of this seminar, our attention to detail in the marginal and mundane will expand and widen the possibilities of our vision. We will leave with the ability to shift the scale of our attention and deepen our capacity to notice (and enter) these ever-present infinitesimal worlds.

Led by Renee Bell, assistant professor of mathematics at Lehman College.

Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00pm

October 7-21

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.

Please see our Refund Policy HERE.

Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.

On the spatial politics of the flash mob

From novel, to viral, to commercial, to cringe: the life cycle of the flash mob, an internet trend that got people off the internet to gather in physical space. Now, fifteen years past its cultural peak, we have enough distance to study the flash mob as a social phenomenon, organizing practice, and art form.  

What can we understand about culture, virality, and public performance by tracking the history and transformation of the flash mob? From the proliferation of interventionist public performance art in the 20th century to the internet’s creation of “smart mobs” to the specific conditions of virality in the mid 2010s and its relationship to commercialism, we will begin to see flash mobs as an action with real cultural and social organizing potential. 

We will also study the formal ingredients of the flash mob — instantaneous and often joyful synchronized behaviors performed briefly in a public space — and the way this mode of shared experience has been shaped by advances in technology. Together, we will think through the liberatory and resistance-oriented cultural potential that may be discovered in this form. Is it possible to reclaim this "viral" mode of gathering for something greater than likes and reshares? 

Led by interdisciplinary theatre artist and educator Sheridan Merrick.

Thursdays, 6:30-9:00pm

October 15-29

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.

Please see our Refund Policy HERE.

Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.

Photo by Morteza Akhnia

On the spatial politics of the flash mob

From novel, to viral, to commercial, to cringe: the life cycle of the flash mob, an internet trend that got people off the internet to gather in physical space. Now, fifteen years past its cultural peak, we have enough distance to study the flash mob as a social phenomenon, organizing practice, and art form.  

What can we understand about culture, virality, and public performance by tracking the history and transformation of the flash mob? From the proliferation of interventionist public performance art in the 20th century to the internet’s creation of “smart mobs” to the specific conditions of virality in the mid 2010s and its relationship to commercialism, we will begin to see flash mobs as an action with real cultural and social organizing potential. 

We will also study the formal ingredients of the flash mob — instantaneous and often joyful synchronized behaviors performed briefly in a public space — and the way this mode of shared experience has been shaped by advances in technology. Together, we will think through the liberatory and resistance-oriented cultural potential that may be discovered in this form. Is it possible to reclaim this "viral" mode of gathering for something greater than likes and reshares? 

Led by interdisciplinary theatre artist and educator Sheridan Merrick.

Thursdays, 6:30-9:00pm

October 15-29

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.

Please see our Refund Policy HERE.

Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.

Photo by Morteza Akhnia

RSVP HERE!

Toni Morrison's contributions to literature and American culture are a case study in the powers of human attention: to the possibilities of language, to the complexity of love, and to the pain and beauty of our American inheritance. In this evening of close reading and discussion, we'll take a close look at one of Morrison's essays with novelist, critic, and scholar Prof. Namwali Serpell, author of On Morrison (Hogarth 2026). The close reading will be followed by a Q&A with Prof. Serpell on Morrison's work as a whole.

Photo credit: Toni Morrison in her office at Random House (Jill Krementz)

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On the reenchantment of invisible labor

Cook, clean, comfort, teach, repeat. Social reproduction is the engine of collective life and housework its most intimate geography. What we don’t attend to turns invisible, and both the labor of housework and those who perform it are frequent victims of this invisibility. In this course we will attend closely to often-marginalized domestic labor. We will do so from three distinct sociocultural vantage points: housework as world-building, as art practice, and as ritual. 

Our time together will take us through the International Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s, thinkers on the politics of care such as M.E. O’Brien and Mai’a Williams, the art practices of Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Mona Hatoum, and the contemplative work of Thich Nhat Hanh. Through discussion, attention practices, collaborative writing, and experimental performance art, we will explore historical and contemporary interventions into housework and investigate what rigorous attention might alchemize our daily labor into. 

Students should come ready to examine the role of housework in their own lives with generous curiosity. Dirty dishes optional. 

Led by feminist writer, researcher, and organizer Zafi Tate.

Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00pm

November 4-18

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.

Please see our Refund Policy HERE.

Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.

On the reenchantment of invisible labor

Cook, clean, comfort, teach, repeat. Social reproduction is the engine of collective life and housework its most intimate geography. What we don’t attend to turns invisible, and both the labor of housework and those who perform it are frequent victims of this invisibility. In this course we will attend closely to often-marginalized domestic labor. We will do so from three distinct sociocultural vantage points: housework as world-building, as art practice, and as ritual. 

Our time together will take us through the International Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s, thinkers on the politics of care such as M.E. O’Brien and Mai’a Williams, the art practices of Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Mona Hatoum, and the contemplative work of Thich Nhat Hanh. Through discussion, attention practices, collaborative writing, and experimental performance art, we will explore historical and contemporary interventions into housework and investigate what rigorous attention might alchemize our daily labor into. 

Students should come ready to examine the role of housework in their own lives with generous curiosity. Dirty dishes optional. 

Led by feminist writer, researcher, and organizer Zafi Tate.

Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00pm

November 4-18

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.

Please see our Refund Policy HERE.

Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.

On the reenchantment of invisible labor

Cook, clean, comfort, teach, repeat. Social reproduction is the engine of collective life and housework its most intimate geography. What we don’t attend to turns invisible, and both the labor of housework and those who perform it are frequent victims of this invisibility. In this course we will attend closely to often-marginalized domestic labor. We will do so from three distinct sociocultural vantage points: housework as world-building, as art practice, and as ritual. 

Our time together will take us through the International Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s, thinkers on the politics of care such as M.E. O’Brien and Mai’a Williams, the art practices of Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Mona Hatoum, and the contemplative work of Thich Nhat Hanh. Through discussion, attention practices, collaborative writing, and experimental performance art, we will explore historical and contemporary interventions into housework and investigate what rigorous attention might alchemize our daily labor into. 

Students should come ready to examine the role of housework in their own lives with generous curiosity. Dirty dishes optional. 

Led by feminist writer, researcher, and organizer Zafi Tate.

Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00pm

November 4-18

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.

Please see our Refund Policy HERE.

Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.

ENROLL HERE!

Our flagship course on the attention crisis and collective action

Attention is the touchstone problem of our age. Over the last twenty years, an unprecedented concentration of technical and financial power has successfully monetized human attention. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.

In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Anna Tsing, Natasha Dow Schull, Shoshanna Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Jonathan Crary, among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?

Please note: this is an IN-PERSON section of our course.

Mondays, 6:30-8:15pm

November 30th-December 14th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Please see our Refund Policy HERE.

Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.

Image credit: Pewter Chalice (1935–1942) by James H.C. Vail. Original from The National Galley of Art.

Our flagship course on the attention crisis and collective action

Attention is the touchstone problem of our age. Over the last twenty years, an unprecedented concentration of technical and financial power has successfully monetized human attention. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.

In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Anna Tsing, Natasha Dow Schull, Shoshanna Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Jonathan Crary, among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?

Please note: this is an IN-PERSON section of our course.

Mondays, 6:30-8:15pm

November 30th-December 14th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Please see our Refund Policy HERE.

Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.

Image credit: Pewter Chalice (1935–1942) by James H.C. Vail. Original from The National Galley of Art.

Our flagship course on the attention crisis and collective action

Attention is the touchstone problem of our age. Over the last twenty years, an unprecedented concentration of technical and financial power has successfully monetized human attention. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.

In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Anna Tsing, Natasha Dow Schull, Shoshanna Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Jonathan Crary, among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?

Please note: this is an IN-PERSON section of our course.

Mondays, 6:30-8:15pm

November 30th-December 14th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Please see our Refund Policy HERE.

Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.

Image credit: Pewter Chalice (1935–1942) by James H.C. Vail. Original from The National Galley of Art.