RSVP HERE!

Join us to celebrate the opening of our first summer show, Beyond Dark Flow: an exhibition that explores games as digital and physical spaces of collective attention, centering on the current landscape of independent gaming communities. For the opening night only, attendees are invited to play—and even co-create—an expanded set of online and physical games from participating artists. Design collective Aging in Play will showcase play boxes, modular parts made from everyday materials that attendees can rearrange to create their own games; artist collective Boshi’s Place offers additional game stations created by their independent developers modeling alternative modes of attention through text, ambient environments, and nonlinear narratives; and researcher and educator Catherine L. Hansen invites us to modify an interactive fiction she developed with University Tokyo students which allows players to “burrow” into an object of choice with close, sustained attention. 

This is a free event. Light refreshments will be provided.

Image courtesy of Boshi’s place.

To resist toxic UX, we must first understand it. Why is it so hard to stop an infinite scroll? Why is your thumb already twitching when your phone buzzes in your pocket? In this course - led by an instructor with over a decade of experience building these systems at Meta, Amazon, and Google - we will go deep into the design principles of coercive attention capture. Drawing on the work of Jenny Odell, Neil Postman, and others, we will ask: How do these UX techniques operate on the body? How do they narrow consciousness? What possibilities of attention do they foreclose?

Once we understand, we will develop strategies for resistance and explore possibilities for non-toxic UX. If toxic systems collapse our attention into one thing (the reflexive, the reactive, the monetizable), what other shapes of attention are possible, and how might we design for those instead?

Each student will create, over the course of the seminar, a personal attention artifact: a designed object or practice built around your specific patterns, pressure points, and the conditions under which you are most alive to the world.

No background in UX or design is necessary. Liberation from Toxic UX is for everyone.

Led by product designer and writer Ashley Glover.

Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
June 2nd-16th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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 credit: Maxim Hopman. 

ENROLL HERE!

The party is one of the most powerful and least examined human technologies. Something happens at parties that resists description: a loosening, a possibility, an encounter that couldn't have been planned. And yet parties have shaped history more than most textbooks admit — movements are born at parties, love affairs that changed the world began on dance floors, political formations crystallized around a shared table.

This course turns radical attention toward the party as a social and political form. What defines it? What separates a party from a gathering or a scene from a moment? How can parties be designed to encourage certain kinds of attention — and what kinds most naturally emerge? We'll build a shared vocabulary across study and practice — examining parties that made history, from Studio 54 to Harlem rent parties to Enlightenment salons — while also prototyping our own. Embodied exercises, creative experiments, and close reading sit alongside each other, with thinkers like Saidiya Hartman, Jose Esteban Munoz, adrienne marie brown, and Rirkrit Tiravanija guiding us. You will leave with both a theory of the party and something worth throwing.

Led by Kyle Barnes, performer and worldmaker who knows how to have a good time.

Thursdays, 6:30-9:00pm
June 11th-25th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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: “Studio Party (Soirée)” by Florine Stettheimer, via public domain.

“There are at least two kinds of games,” says James P. Carse. “One could be called finite; the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.” 

In his short philosophical book, Finite and Infinite Games, Carse uses this contrast as a framework to examine the underlying logic of our systems and social behaviors. How do finite goals limit our play? What sorts of boundaries or structures ensure a game can keep going? In this Study, we’ll think about the ways rules can enable or limit experience — and experiment with approaching our own attention as an infinite game.

Text: James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games

Date: Friday, June 12th at 7pm

Location: Herbert von King Park with Connor and Anna Beth

If you are interested in attending this Study, email strotherschool@sustainedattention.net

The Attention Labs are an experiential, participatory workshop curriculum dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention. Through group attention practices and guided discussions, we create and test tools to build sanctuaries of attention — as well as networks of solidarity to sustain them. 

ENROLL HERE!

How do the shapes of our lives determine our ability to envision and embody a shared world? 

Thich Nhất Hạnh’s The Art of Living explores “interbeing,” the notion that bodies and beings are inextricable from one another. Báyò Akómoláfé’s Selah examines the borders and boundaries that uphold our modern world. Both texts ask: What if our solutions to today’s wrongs are simply a part of the problem? 

In this Study, let’s explore how to reshape a world that has already shaped us, whose arrangements we inherit before we can question them. Maybe we’ll even recover the ability to shape each other.

Text: Thich Nhất Hạnh’s The Art of Living & Báyò Akómoláfé’s Selah

Date: Sunday, June 14th at 3pm

Location: Columbus Circle with staoue and Eleanor

If you are interested in attending this Study, email strotherschool@sustainedattention.net

RSVP HERE!

At this evening talk with educator and researcher Catherine L. Hansen, we phone Tokyo to discuss what video games and other game media can show us, as laboratories of radical, minor, non-commodified attention. Interactive fiction (IF) lies at the intersection of experimental and avant-garde lineages in art and literature, from Dada and Surrealism to pataphysics and the Oulipo—a mid-century US hobbyist counterculture of coders, cavers, and D&D role-players—and a contemporary community of noncommercial makers and storytellers.

How are avant-garde dreams of revolutionizing everyday life through renewed attention still alive in today’s gaming cultures, from mainstream to marginal? How have they been sustained or challenged by new technologies? How can text democratize the attentional architecture of gaming? Finally, how can we look at games (including IF) as a place where practices of attention become negotiable, communal, newly legible, and unpredictably creative? How can this help us see familiar games differently, and also imagine what games could still be?

In light of these questions, we will talk about and play X is for Examine, a collection of IF games made by Hansen and her University of Tokyo students Lee Carlisle, Chenren Li, and Edwin Zheng, now on view at SoRA’s current exhibition, Beyond Dark Flow.

Led by Catherine L. Hansen, who teaches literature, writing, and game studies at the Center for Global Education, University of Tokyo. She is coeditor/author of In Search of the Third Bird: Exemplary Essays from The Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), 2001-2021 and author of Powers of No: The Infra Noir Surrealist Group (November 2026).

To resist toxic UX, we must first understand it. Why is it so hard to stop an infinite scroll? Why is your thumb already twitching when your phone buzzes in your pocket? In this course - led by an instructor with over a decade of experience building these systems at Meta, Amazon, and Google - we will go deep into the design principles of coercive attention capture. Drawing on the work of Jenny Odell, Neil Postman, and others, we will ask: How do these UX techniques operate on the body? How do they narrow consciousness? What possibilities of attention do they foreclose?

Once we understand, we will develop strategies for resistance and explore possibilities for non-toxic UX. If toxic systems collapse our attention into one thing (the reflexive, the reactive, the monetizable), what other shapes of attention are possible, and how might we design for those instead?

Each student will create, over the course of the seminar, a personal attention artifact: a designed object or practice built around your specific patterns, pressure points, and the conditions under which you are most alive to the world.

No background in UX or design is necessary. Liberation from Toxic UX is for everyone.

Led by product designer and writer Ashley Glover.

Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
June 2nd-16th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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 credit: Maxim Hopman. 

The party is one of the most powerful and least examined human technologies. Something happens at parties that resists description: a loosening, a possibility, an encounter that couldn't have been planned. And yet parties have shaped history more than most textbooks admit — movements are born at parties, love affairs that changed the world began on dance floors, political formations crystallized around a shared table.

This course turns radical attention toward the party as a social and political form. What defines it? What separates a party from a gathering or a scene from a moment? How can parties be designed to encourage certain kinds of attention — and what kinds most naturally emerge? We'll build a shared vocabulary across study and practice — examining parties that made history, from Studio 54 to Harlem rent parties to Enlightenment salons — while also prototyping our own. Embodied exercises, creative experiments, and close reading sit alongside each other, with thinkers like Saidiya Hartman, Jose Esteban Munoz, adrienne marie brown, and Rirkrit Tiravanija guiding us. You will leave with both a theory of the party and something worth throwing.

Led by Kyle Barnes, performer and worldmaker who knows how to have a good time.

Thursdays, 6:30-9:00pm
June 11th-25th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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: “Studio Party (Soirée)” by Florine Stettheimer, via public domain.

What symbols live within us? When given form through words and pictures, what do these symbols say about our lived experience? Does the human impulse toward symbolism produce a loss or gain in meaning?

The work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, rooted in the downtown New York art scene of the late 1970s and ’80s and now central to the contemporary art canon, speaks beyond his time. Even today, his use of iconography reaches us as a provocation: “What did he mean with this image?”

In this Study we will take a page from Basquiat's book by creating personal symbologies and attempting to dialogue with one another’s shapes.

Text: Phillip Auction House’s depiction of Jean-Michel Basquiat “The Icons of an Icon”

Date: Thursday, June 18th at 7pm

Location: Museum of Street Art with Anha and Richard

If you are interested in attending this Study, email strotherschool@sustainedattention.net

ENROLL HERE!

Over the last century, human attention has been re-defined as the ability to sit still, monitor screens, and select for a task. This seminar explores how that transformation was developed in laboratories, and how attention activists today are breaking open the frame. We will work across two parallel spaces over six weeks: SoRA's seminar room, and a studio at Pioneer Works.

At SoRA, we will trace the entanglement of lab and art practices from the late nineteenth century to the present, through test subjects, apparatuses, experimental choreographies, reenactment, and the aesthetics of objectivity. We will examine the history of psychological "attention studies" across research programs including Edward B. Titchener's psychometrics and Wilhelm Wundt's reaction-time rigs.

At Pioneer Works, we will create a full-scale reconstruction of Titchener's 1890s acoustic experiments from the Cornell laboratory as a site for our own hands-on thinking about attention. 

Across both spaces, we will make and think about and reimagine human-machine relationships — their histories, critiques, and afterlives in art.

Led by Julian Chehirian, multimedia artist, historian of science, and current Visual Arts Resident at Pioneer Works.

Note: This special six-week Studio Seminar will meet at SoRA’s Sanctuary Gallery on Saturdays June 20th, July 11th, and July 25th, and at Pioneer Works on June 27th, July 18th, and August 1st.

Saturdays, 2:00-4:30pm
June 20th - August 1st (no class on July 4th)

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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.

The Attention Labs are an experiential, participatory workshop curriculum dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention. Through group attention practices and guided discussions, we create and test tools to build sanctuaries of attention — as well as networks of solidarity to sustain them. 

ENROLL HERE!

ENROLL HERE!

Puppetry is, at its core, a practice of attention. A puppet lives and dies by the shared focus of puppeteers and audience, who collaborate to give life to the inanimate. Through individual awareness and group attunement, puppeteers access a language rich in empathy, mystery and radical narrative possibility.

Against the common idea of puppetry as an emblem of control or domination, we approach puppetry as a process of listening and offering—of uncovering and working with the inherent tendencies of materials. We’re interested in the creative feedback loop between bodies, objects and the imagination. 

Each class combines theory, hands-on puppet making, and group puppeteering. We’ll begin with simple paper forms, exploring how breath, weight, and gaze can bring them to life. Gradually, we build toward multi-operator abstract creatures, and finally toward more fleshed out humanoid tabletop puppet prototypes, in the lineage of Bunraku, a traditional Japanese form.

Throughout the class, we'll put fabrication and performance in dialogue. Design and fabrication will respond to what the materials offer, incorporating chance and discovery. Likewise, our performance practice will bloom from what the objects themselves reveal through the creative power of our attention.

Led by puppet artist Nick Lehane and puppeteer-mythmaker Yuliya Tsukerman.

Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
June 24th - July 8th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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.

The contemporary western world (and beyond) has designed infrastructures of oppression, containment, and the erasure of Black and Indigenous life.

This Study will examine the relational infrastructures that overlay “the weather” (Christina Sharpe) — that is, the machinations that shape our lived spatial environments. How might we move through “geographies of unfreedom” towards liberatory futures? Can an abolitionist framework direct us in unmaking spaces of enclosure? Can we shape more expansive spaces capable of holding our full selves?

Text: Christina Sharpe’s Black Gathering: An Assembly in Three Parts (from Reconstructions: Architecture & Blackness in America) & Joseph M. Peirce’s A Manifesto for Speculative Relations (from Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World)

Date: Wednesday, June 24th at 7pm

Location: Bed-Stuy with Lindsee & Cherilyn

If you are interested in attending this Study, email strotherschool@sustainedattention.net

The party is one of the most powerful and least examined human technologies. Something happens at parties that resists description: a loosening, a possibility, an encounter that couldn't have been planned. And yet parties have shaped history more than most textbooks admit — movements are born at parties, love affairs that changed the world began on dance floors, political formations crystallized around a shared table.

This course turns radical attention toward the party as a social and political form. What defines it? What separates a party from a gathering or a scene from a moment? How can parties be designed to encourage certain kinds of attention — and what kinds most naturally emerge? We'll build a shared vocabulary across study and practice — examining parties that made history, from Studio 54 to Harlem rent parties to Enlightenment salons — while also prototyping our own. Embodied exercises, creative experiments, and close reading sit alongside each other, with thinkers like Saidiya Hartman, Jose Esteban Munoz, adrienne marie brown, and Rirkrit Tiravanija guiding us. You will leave with both a theory of the party and something worth throwing.

Led by Kyle Barnes, performer and worldmaker who knows how to have a good time.

Thursdays, 6:30-9:00pm
June 11th-25th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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: “Studio Party (Soirée)” by Florine Stettheimer, via public domain.

Over the last century, human attention has been re-defined as the ability to sit still, monitor screens, and select for a task. This seminar explores how that transformation was developed in laboratories, and how attention activists today are breaking open the frame. We will work across two parallel spaces over six weeks: SoRA's seminar room, and a studio at Pioneer Works.

At SoRA, we will trace the entanglement of lab and art practices from the late nineteenth century to the present, through test subjects, apparatuses, experimental choreographies, reenactment, and the aesthetics of objectivity. We will examine the history of psychological "attention studies" across research programs including Edward B. Titchener's psychometrics and Wilhelm Wundt's reaction-time rigs.

At Pioneer Works, we will create a full-scale reconstruction of Titchener's 1890s acoustic experiments from the Cornell laboratory as a site for our own hands-on thinking about attention. 

Across both spaces, we will make and think about and reimagine human-machine relationships — their histories, critiques, and afterlives in art.

Led by Julian Chehirian, multimedia artist, historian of science, and current Visual Arts Resident at Pioneer Works.

Note: This special six-week Studio Seminar will meet at SoRA’s Sanctuary Gallery on Saturdays June 20th, July 11th, and July 25th, and at Pioneer Works on June 27th, July 18th, and August 1st.

Saturdays, 2:00-4:30pm
June 20th - August 1st (no class on July 4th)

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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.

How has our imagination been seized? Who has seized it? And how do we reclaim our ability to reenvision the world? 

Drawing from game designer Meguey Baker’s text, this Study will explore theories in game design and bring into question our very ability to imagine alternative futures. Together, we will investigate the history of an object to understand the logic of its design and modern function. With close attention, might we be able to fashion new futures for that object — and from that small act, build new worlds?

Text: Meguey Baker’s Follow The Thread: A Worldbuilding Guide

Date: Tuesday, June 30th at 7pm

Location: Williamsburg with Katie & Samvit

If you are interested in attending this Study, email strotherschool@sustainedattention.net

Puppetry is, at its core, a practice of attention. A puppet lives and dies by the shared focus of puppeteers and audience, who collaborate to give life to the inanimate. Through individual awareness and group attunement, puppeteers access a language rich in empathy, mystery and radical narrative possibility.

Against the common idea of puppetry as an emblem of control or domination, we approach puppetry as a process of listening and offering—of uncovering and working with the inherent tendencies of materials. We’re interested in the creative feedback loop between bodies, objects and the imagination. 

Each class combines theory, hands-on puppet making, and group puppeteering. We’ll begin with simple paper forms, exploring how breath, weight, and gaze can bring them to life. Gradually, we build toward multi-operator abstract creatures, and finally toward more fleshed out humanoid tabletop puppet prototypes, in the lineage of Bunraku, a traditional Japanese form.

Throughout the class, we'll put fabrication and performance in dialogue. Design and fabrication will respond to what the materials offer, incorporating chance and discovery. Likewise, our performance practice will bloom from what the objects themselves reveal through the creative power of our attention.

Led by puppet artist Nick Lehane and puppeteer-mythmaker Yuliya Tsukerman.

Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
June 24th - July 8th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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!

When philosopher Thomas Nagel asks, “What is it like to be a bat?”, he comes up against a core problem: humans can only think in human terms. As Nagel says, “If I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.” But do not despair. We can dare to push beyond Nagel’s limits. Moving between science, philosophy, and art, this seminar will explore possible paths for understanding the subjective experience of non-human animals.

We will begin with human and non-human umwelt or life-worlds. Attuning to our own sensory inputs, mental constructs, and bodily movement, we will describe our life-worlds and then attend to the senses, mental matrixes, and corporeal movement of various animals. Then, drawing on thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ed Young, and Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, we will bend our subjective experience to more fully develop “what it is like” to be other-than-human. Over the course of the seminar, each participant will create paths of kinship with their selected other creatures and present ways of understanding these non-human life-worlds.

No background in philosophy is necessary. Bring curiosity, creativity, and wonder. 

Led by Ron Broglio, Director of the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University.

Mondays, 6:30-9:00pm
July 6th-20th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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: “Fight between a Tiger and a Buffalo” by Henri Rousseau, via public domain.

Puppetry is, at its core, a practice of attention. A puppet lives and dies by the shared focus of puppeteers and audience, who collaborate to give life to the inanimate. Through individual awareness and group attunement, puppeteers access a language rich in empathy, mystery and radical narrative possibility.

Against the common idea of puppetry as an emblem of control or domination, we approach puppetry as a process of listening and offering—of uncovering and working with the inherent tendencies of materials. We’re interested in the creative feedback loop between bodies, objects and the imagination. 

Each class combines theory, hands-on puppet making, and group puppeteering. We’ll begin with simple paper forms, exploring how breath, weight, and gaze can bring them to life. Gradually, we build toward multi-operator abstract creatures, and finally toward more fleshed out humanoid tabletop puppet prototypes, in the lineage of Bunraku, a traditional Japanese form.

Throughout the class, we'll put fabrication and performance in dialogue. Design and fabrication will respond to what the materials offer, incorporating chance and discovery. Likewise, our performance practice will bloom from what the objects themselves reveal through the creative power of our attention.

Led by puppet artist Nick Lehane and puppeteer-mythmaker Yuliya Tsukerman.

Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
June 24th - July 8th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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.

Over the last century, human attention has been re-defined as the ability to sit still, monitor screens, and select for a task. This seminar explores how that transformation was developed in laboratories, and how attention activists today are breaking open the frame. We will work across two parallel spaces over six weeks: SoRA's seminar room, and a studio at Pioneer Works.

At SoRA, we will trace the entanglement of lab and art practices from the late nineteenth century to the present, through test subjects, apparatuses, experimental choreographies, reenactment, and the aesthetics of objectivity. We will examine the history of psychological "attention studies" across research programs including Edward B. Titchener's psychometrics and Wilhelm Wundt's reaction-time rigs.

At Pioneer Works, we will create a full-scale reconstruction of Titchener's 1890s acoustic experiments from the Cornell laboratory as a site for our own hands-on thinking about attention. 

Across both spaces, we will make and think about and reimagine human-machine relationships — their histories, critiques, and afterlives in art.

Led by Julian Chehirian, multimedia artist, historian of science, and current Visual Arts Resident at Pioneer Works.

Note: This special six-week Studio Seminar will meet at SoRA’s Sanctuary Gallery on Saturdays June 20th, July 11th, and July 25th, and at Pioneer Works on June 27th, July 18th, and August 1st.

Saturdays, 2:00-4:30pm
June 20th - August 1st (no class on July 4th)

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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.

When philosopher Thomas Nagel asks, “What is it like to be a bat?”, he comes up against a core problem: humans can only think in human terms. As Nagel says, “If I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.” But do not despair. We can dare to push beyond Nagel’s limits. Moving between science, philosophy, and art, this seminar will explore possible paths for understanding the subjective experience of non-human animals.

We will begin with human and non-human umwelt or life-worlds. Attuning to our own sensory inputs, mental constructs, and bodily movement, we will describe our life-worlds and then attend to the senses, mental matrixes, and corporeal movement of various animals. Then, drawing on thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ed Young, and Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, we will bend our subjective experience to more fully develop “what it is like” to be other-than-human. Over the course of the seminar, each participant will create paths of kinship with their selected other creatures and present ways of understanding these non-human life-worlds.

No background in philosophy is necessary. Bring curiosity, creativity, and wonder. 

Led by Ron Broglio, Director of the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University.

Mondays, 6:30-9:00pm
July 6th-20th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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: “Fight between a Tiger and a Buffalo” by Henri Rousseau, via public domain.

ENROLL HERE!

“If you want to defeat a god or an ideal, go for the joints.” 

-Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World

Across mythological traditions, the trickster exists to outwit the devouring forces of the world, redistribute power, and catalyze more lifegiving worlds. A shapeshifter and thief, trickster wields mischief against muscle to dissolve the status quo and make the conditions of life pliable again.

CULTURE JAMMING is the modern trickster’s modus operandi. By intercepting the codes of dominant culture through subvertising, infiltration, mimicry, and satire, culture jammers wield the trickster's ancient mischief to deflate corporate power at the interfaces where it attempts to shape public perception — and where the attention economy thrives on the invisibility of its machinery.When the game is rigged, trickster changes the rules. 

In this course we’ll explore what role culture jamming can play in liberating attention from the extractive grasp of the attention economy’s profiteers, and in holding them accountable. How does the trickster sensibility shift how and what we perceive? Drawing on the work of Lewis Hyde, Iain McGilchrist, and the history of culture jamming from Romantic Era revolutionaries through the Luddite Club and the Yes Men, we’ll develop a practical and imaginative toolkit for intervention and collective attentional liberation.

Led by Molly Gore, filmmaker, activist, and core member of prankster collective The Yes Men.

Thursdays, 6:30-9:00pm
July 16th-30th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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 Credit: Bess Adler

Over the last century, human attention has been re-defined as the ability to sit still, monitor screens, and select for a task. This seminar explores how that transformation was developed in laboratories, and how attention activists today are breaking open the frame. We will work across two parallel spaces over six weeks: SoRA's seminar room, and a studio at Pioneer Works.

At SoRA, we will trace the entanglement of lab and art practices from the late nineteenth century to the present, through test subjects, apparatuses, experimental choreographies, reenactment, and the aesthetics of objectivity. We will examine the history of psychological "attention studies" across research programs including Edward B. Titchener's psychometrics and Wilhelm Wundt's reaction-time rigs.

At Pioneer Works, we will create a full-scale reconstruction of Titchener's 1890s acoustic experiments from the Cornell laboratory as a site for our own hands-on thinking about attention. 

Across both spaces, we will make and think about and reimagine human-machine relationships — their histories, critiques, and afterlives in art.

Led by Julian Chehirian, multimedia artist, historian of science, and current Visual Arts Resident at Pioneer Works.

Note: This special six-week Studio Seminar will meet at SoRA’s Sanctuary Gallery on Saturdays June 20th, July 11th, and July 25th, and at Pioneer Works on June 27th, July 18th, and August 1st.

Saturdays, 2:00-4:30pm
June 20th - August 1st (no class on July 4th)

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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.

When philosopher Thomas Nagel asks, “What is it like to be a bat?”, he comes up against a core problem: humans can only think in human terms. As Nagel says, “If I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.” But do not despair. We can dare to push beyond Nagel’s limits. Moving between science, philosophy, and art, this seminar will explore possible paths for understanding the subjective experience of non-human animals.

We will begin with human and non-human umwelt or life-worlds. Attuning to our own sensory inputs, mental constructs, and bodily movement, we will describe our life-worlds and then attend to the senses, mental matrixes, and corporeal movement of various animals. Then, drawing on thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ed Young, and Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, we will bend our subjective experience to more fully develop “what it is like” to be other-than-human. Over the course of the seminar, each participant will create paths of kinship with their selected other creatures and present ways of understanding these non-human life-worlds.

No background in philosophy is necessary. Bring curiosity, creativity, and wonder. 

Led by Ron Broglio, Director of the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University.

Mondays, 6:30-9:00pm
July 6th-20th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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: “Fight between a Tiger and a Buffalo” by Henri Rousseau, via public domain.

ENROLL HERE!

What if the mind is not a “point of subjectivity” but a landscape of subjectivities we navigate through thinking? The hippocampus is often called the brain's GPS – and recent neuroscience suggests this role may be even stranger and more expansive than it first appears. As it turns out, we use the same bodily habits to move through a neighborhood as we do to move through a difficult conversation, a grief, an idea, or a virtual space. What kinds of attention does this “navigational mind” make possible, and what emerges when we give our attention to these orienting patterns themselves?

Drawing on the work of neuroscientists, philosophers, and Hiott’s own accomplished research on the navigational mind, we'll ask what it means to understand cognition as something that happens at multiple ecological scales – and what is at stake when those ecologies are threatened by attention fracking. 

This seminar is about the embodied, ongoing action (movement) of attention. It is about noticing where we are and how that is always connected to all the places (geographical, social, virtual, etc.) that we have ever been. We will let science and philosophy come together with our own ongoing way-making and way-finding to empower practical shifts in the power and presence of our mind, consciousness and care.

Led by Andrea Hiott, philosopher and neuroscientist at Universität Heidelberg and author of Holding Paradox.

Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
July 21st-August 4th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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.

“If you want to defeat a god or an ideal, go for the joints.” 

-Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World

Across mythological traditions, the trickster exists to outwit the devouring forces of the world, redistribute power, and catalyze more lifegiving worlds. A shapeshifter and thief, trickster wields mischief against muscle to dissolve the status quo and make the conditions of life pliable again.

CULTURE JAMMING is the modern trickster’s modus operandi. By intercepting the codes of dominant culture through subvertising, infiltration, mimicry, and satire, culture jammers wield the trickster's ancient mischief to deflate corporate power at the interfaces where it attempts to shape public perception — and where the attention economy thrives on the invisibility of its machinery.When the game is rigged, trickster changes the rules. 

In this course we’ll explore what role culture jamming can play in liberating attention from the extractive grasp of the attention economy’s profiteers, and in holding them accountable. How does the trickster sensibility shift how and what we perceive? Drawing on the work of Lewis Hyde, Iain McGilchrist, and the history of culture jamming from Romantic Era revolutionaries through the Luddite Club and the Yes Men, we’ll develop a practical and imaginative toolkit for intervention and collective attentional liberation.

Led by Molly Gore, filmmaker, activist, and core member of prankster collective The Yes Men.

Thursdays, 6:30-9:00pm
July 16th-30th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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 Credit: Bess Adler

Over the last century, human attention has been re-defined as the ability to sit still, monitor screens, and select for a task. This seminar explores how that transformation was developed in laboratories, and how attention activists today are breaking open the frame. We will work across two parallel spaces over six weeks: SoRA's seminar room, and a studio at Pioneer Works.

At SoRA, we will trace the entanglement of lab and art practices from the late nineteenth century to the present, through test subjects, apparatuses, experimental choreographies, reenactment, and the aesthetics of objectivity. We will examine the history of psychological "attention studies" across research programs including Edward B. Titchener's psychometrics and Wilhelm Wundt's reaction-time rigs.

At Pioneer Works, we will create a full-scale reconstruction of Titchener's 1890s acoustic experiments from the Cornell laboratory as a site for our own hands-on thinking about attention. 

Across both spaces, we will make and think about and reimagine human-machine relationships — their histories, critiques, and afterlives in art.

Led by Julian Chehirian, multimedia artist, historian of science, and current Visual Arts Resident at Pioneer Works.

Note: This special six-week Studio Seminar will meet at SoRA’s Sanctuary Gallery on Saturdays June 20th, July 11th, and July 25th, and at Pioneer Works on June 27th, July 18th, and August 1st.

Saturdays, 2:00-4:30pm
June 20th - August 1st (no class on July 4th)

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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.

What if the mind is not a “point of subjectivity” but a landscape of subjectivities we navigate through thinking? The hippocampus is often called the brain's GPS – and recent neuroscience suggests this role may be even stranger and more expansive than it first appears. As it turns out, we use the same bodily habits to move through a neighborhood as we do to move through a difficult conversation, a grief, an idea, or a virtual space. What kinds of attention does this “navigational mind” make possible, and what emerges when we give our attention to these orienting patterns themselves?

Drawing on the work of neuroscientists, philosophers, and Hiott’s own accomplished research on the navigational mind, we'll ask what it means to understand cognition as something that happens at multiple ecological scales – and what is at stake when those ecologies are threatened by attention fracking. 

This seminar is about the embodied, ongoing action (movement) of attention. It is about noticing where we are and how that is always connected to all the places (geographical, social, virtual, etc.) that we have ever been. We will let science and philosophy come together with our own ongoing way-making and way-finding to empower practical shifts in the power and presence of our mind, consciousness and care.

Led by Andrea Hiott, philosopher and neuroscientist at Universität Heidelberg and author of Holding Paradox.

Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
July 21st-August 4th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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.

“If you want to defeat a god or an ideal, go for the joints.” 

-Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World

Across mythological traditions, the trickster exists to outwit the devouring forces of the world, redistribute power, and catalyze more lifegiving worlds. A shapeshifter and thief, trickster wields mischief against muscle to dissolve the status quo and make the conditions of life pliable again.

CULTURE JAMMING is the modern trickster’s modus operandi. By intercepting the codes of dominant culture through subvertising, infiltration, mimicry, and satire, culture jammers wield the trickster's ancient mischief to deflate corporate power at the interfaces where it attempts to shape public perception — and where the attention economy thrives on the invisibility of its machinery.When the game is rigged, trickster changes the rules. 

In this course we’ll explore what role culture jamming can play in liberating attention from the extractive grasp of the attention economy’s profiteers, and in holding them accountable. How does the trickster sensibility shift how and what we perceive? Drawing on the work of Lewis Hyde, Iain McGilchrist, and the history of culture jamming from Romantic Era revolutionaries through the Luddite Club and the Yes Men, we’ll develop a practical and imaginative toolkit for intervention and collective attentional liberation.

Led by Molly Gore, filmmaker, activist, and core member of prankster collective The Yes Men.

Thursdays, 6:30-9:00pm
July 16th-30th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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 Credit: Bess Adler

Over the last century, human attention has been re-defined as the ability to sit still, monitor screens, and select for a task. This seminar explores how that transformation was developed in laboratories, and how attention activists today are breaking open the frame. We will work across two parallel spaces over six weeks: SoRA's seminar room, and a studio at Pioneer Works.

At SoRA, we will trace the entanglement of lab and art practices from the late nineteenth century to the present, through test subjects, apparatuses, experimental choreographies, reenactment, and the aesthetics of objectivity. We will examine the history of psychological "attention studies" across research programs including Edward B. Titchener's psychometrics and Wilhelm Wundt's reaction-time rigs.

At Pioneer Works, we will create a full-scale reconstruction of Titchener's 1890s acoustic experiments from the Cornell laboratory as a site for our own hands-on thinking about attention. 

Across both spaces, we will make and think about and reimagine human-machine relationships — their histories, critiques, and afterlives in art.

Led by Julian Chehirian, multimedia artist, historian of science, and current Visual Arts Resident at Pioneer Works.

Note: This special six-week Studio Seminar will meet at SoRA’s Sanctuary Gallery on Saturdays June 20th, July 11th, and July 25th, and at Pioneer Works on June 27th, July 18th, and August 1st.

Saturdays, 2:00-4:30pm
June 20th - August 1st (no class on July 4th)

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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!

Most ghosts don't know they're ghosts; they have to be told. This seminar proceeds from the simple but potentially distressing premise that you are already a ghost. Ghost hunting is a technology of attention and a set of practices for noticing what we have trained ourselves not to see. 

Together, we will explore the history and practice of ghost hunting: its tools (spirit boxes, EMF meters, cameras, the Estes method), its methods, locations, and obsessions. We will read, experiment, and create our own instruments for detecting the paranormal. But the real target of our instruments will be ourselves: how we define ghosts, what technologies mediate these definitions, and what it would mean to finally pay attention to our own haunted condition.

Drawing on both historical study and hands-on experimentation, this seminar asks: what does it mean to hunt for something you already are? What can ghost hunting teach us about attention, mediation, and the eerie persistence of the present? Do you accept that you are a ghost? Can you achieve ghost consciousness?

No prior experience with the paranormal (or its theory) is required. Generosity, curiosity, and a willingness to be haunted are the only prerequisites. Skeptics welcome, ghosts especially.

Led by Katherine Guinness, theorist and historian of contemporary art at the University of Maryland.

Mondays, 6:30-9:00pm
August 3rd-17th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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.

What if the mind is not a “point of subjectivity” but a landscape of subjectivities we navigate through thinking? The hippocampus is often called the brain's GPS – and recent neuroscience suggests this role may be even stranger and more expansive than it first appears. As it turns out, we use the same bodily habits to move through a neighborhood as we do to move through a difficult conversation, a grief, an idea, or a virtual space. What kinds of attention does this “navigational mind” make possible, and what emerges when we give our attention to these orienting patterns themselves?

Drawing on the work of neuroscientists, philosophers, and Hiott’s own accomplished research on the navigational mind, we'll ask what it means to understand cognition as something that happens at multiple ecological scales – and what is at stake when those ecologies are threatened by attention fracking. 

This seminar is about the embodied, ongoing action (movement) of attention. It is about noticing where we are and how that is always connected to all the places (geographical, social, virtual, etc.) that we have ever been. We will let science and philosophy come together with our own ongoing way-making and way-finding to empower practical shifts in the power and presence of our mind, consciousness and care.

Led by Andrea Hiott, philosopher and neuroscientist at Universität Heidelberg and author of Holding Paradox.

Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
July 21st-August 4th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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.

Most ghosts don't know they're ghosts; they have to be told. This seminar proceeds from the simple but potentially distressing premise that you are already a ghost. Ghost hunting is a technology of attention and a set of practices for noticing what we have trained ourselves not to see. 

Together, we will explore the history and practice of ghost hunting: its tools (spirit boxes, EMF meters, cameras, the Estes method), its methods, locations, and obsessions. We will read, experiment, and create our own instruments for detecting the paranormal. But the real target of our instruments will be ourselves: how we define ghosts, what technologies mediate these definitions, and what it would mean to finally pay attention to our own haunted condition.

Drawing on both historical study and hands-on experimentation, this seminar asks: what does it mean to hunt for something you already are? What can ghost hunting teach us about attention, mediation, and the eerie persistence of the present? Do you accept that you are a ghost? Can you achieve ghost consciousness?

No prior experience with the paranormal (or its theory) is required. Generosity, curiosity, and a willingness to be haunted are the only prerequisites. Skeptics welcome, ghosts especially.

Led by Katherine Guinness, theorist and historian of contemporary art at the University of Maryland.

Mondays, 6:30-9:00pm
August 3rd-17th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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!

If there were a patron saint of radical attention, it would be the 20th century activist philosopher Simone Weil. Weil believed that existence itself is God's act of self-renunciation – and that by "giving up being the center of the world in imagination," we participate in the ongoing creation of reality, and especially of our neighbor. 

Since she also believed the deepest truths are “experimental,” needing to be lived before they can be verified, this class will be organized as a shared experiment in the hypothetical reality of creative self-renunciation. We’ll adopt practices of attention inspired by Weil’s writing – meditation, attending to others, and patience – in order to reflect on and share from the experience of what Weil calls the “void.” 

For intellectual exercises, we will read Weil’s work focusing on particular guiding metaphors - water, centers/centering, and poetry – feeling for how our symbols and ways of attending either add dimension to our experience of reality or flatten it.

Our intention is that between Weil's intellectual models, homeopathic doses of the void, and the world of our shared experiences, something sparks: a heightened capacity to be here, at the center of the world's re-creation.

Led by Bert and Emma Fitzgerald, co-organizers of the Simone Weil House in Portland, OR.

Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
August 12th-26th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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.

Most ghosts don't know they're ghosts; they have to be told. This seminar proceeds from the simple but potentially distressing premise that you are already a ghost. Ghost hunting is a technology of attention and a set of practices for noticing what we have trained ourselves not to see. 

Together, we will explore the history and practice of ghost hunting: its tools (spirit boxes, EMF meters, cameras, the Estes method), its methods, locations, and obsessions. We will read, experiment, and create our own instruments for detecting the paranormal. But the real target of our instruments will be ourselves: how we define ghosts, what technologies mediate these definitions, and what it would mean to finally pay attention to our own haunted condition.

Drawing on both historical study and hands-on experimentation, this seminar asks: what does it mean to hunt for something you already are? What can ghost hunting teach us about attention, mediation, and the eerie persistence of the present? Do you accept that you are a ghost? Can you achieve ghost consciousness?

No prior experience with the paranormal (or its theory) is required. Generosity, curiosity, and a willingness to be haunted are the only prerequisites. Skeptics welcome, ghosts especially.

Led by Katherine Guinness, theorist and historian of contemporary art at the University of Maryland.

Mondays, 6:30-9:00pm
August 3rd-17th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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.

If there were a patron saint of radical attention, it would be the 20th century activist philosopher Simone Weil. Weil believed that existence itself is God's act of self-renunciation – and that by "giving up being the center of the world in imagination," we participate in the ongoing creation of reality, and especially of our neighbor. 

Since she also believed the deepest truths are “experimental,” needing to be lived before they can be verified, this class will be organized as a shared experiment in the hypothetical reality of creative self-renunciation. We’ll adopt practices of attention inspired by Weil’s writing – meditation, attending to others, and patience – in order to reflect on and share from the experience of what Weil calls the “void.” 

For intellectual exercises, we will read Weil’s work focusing on particular guiding metaphors - water, centers/centering, and poetry – feeling for how our symbols and ways of attending either add dimension to our experience of reality or flatten it.

Our intention is that between Weil's intellectual models, homeopathic doses of the void, and the world of our shared experiences, something sparks: a heightened capacity to be here, at the center of the world's re-creation.

Led by Bert and Emma Fitzgerald, co-organizers of the Simone Weil House in Portland, OR.

Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
August 12th-26th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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.

If there were a patron saint of radical attention, it would be the 20th century activist philosopher Simone Weil. Weil believed that existence itself is God's act of self-renunciation – and that by "giving up being the center of the world in imagination," we participate in the ongoing creation of reality, and especially of our neighbor. 

Since she also believed the deepest truths are “experimental,” needing to be lived before they can be verified, this class will be organized as a shared experiment in the hypothetical reality of creative self-renunciation. We’ll adopt practices of attention inspired by Weil’s writing – meditation, attending to others, and patience – in order to reflect on and share from the experience of what Weil calls the “void.” 

For intellectual exercises, we will read Weil’s work focusing on particular guiding metaphors - water, centers/centering, and poetry – feeling for how our symbols and ways of attending either add dimension to our experience of reality or flatten it.

Our intention is that between Weil's intellectual models, homeopathic doses of the void, and the world of our shared experiences, something sparks: a heightened capacity to be here, at the center of the world's re-creation.

Led by Bert and Emma Fitzgerald, co-organizers of the Simone Weil House in Portland, OR.

Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
August 12th-26th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted 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.