Join D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt of the Friends of Attention for the launch of their new book, ATTENSITY! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement (Crown), “a stirring battle cry on behalf of our shared humanity against the forces that seek to diminish and degrade it" (Chris Hayes, author of The Sirens’ Call).

RSVP HERE!

From the Strother School of Radical Attention and the New York Philosophy Club comes a unique event designed to challenge and inspire! D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt of the Friends of Attention present their new book, Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement, a rallying cry to fight the commodification of human attention and re-enchant the world. Then join the Friends and the NYPC for a participatory and reflective inquiry into the practice and meaning of ATTENTION. The evening will be a chance to feel the power and beauty of shared time, sensory experience, and radical thought.

RSVP HERE!

RSVP HERE!

Celebrating the launch of Attensity!, the Strother School of Radical Attention (SoRA) holds a series of four participatory events where we will collectively create and test-drive vessels for human attention. Over the course of four weeks, four hosts will activate the Sanctuary Gallery in DUMBO with sound, film, objects and movement, and lecture performance. 

Is it possible to experience the precise moment when an object opens itself up as a vessel for human attention? In turn, how does the vessel beckon our belief in its efficacy? On January 29, artist Park Karo will attempt to unite belief and materiality through performative objects such as “thought emptying ceramics,” “cellular bread,” and “mirror reflecting sin,” which inspire audience-driven rituals where the independent reality of these objects encounter the thoughts and intentions released by audiences. The event begins with guided interactions with the objects which, by gestures of drawing, stacking, and burning, gradually alter and become altered by each participant’s inner life. We will conclude with Karo’s performance where her own body becomes a vessel for fictional symbols.

Image: Park Karo, Thought Emptying Pottery, 2025. Courtesy of the artist. 

About the artist

Korean-born artist Park Karo (New York, NY) investigates human systems of belief in the form of installation, painting, text, ceramics, video, music, performance, and tattoos. She is interested in the process where beliefs materialize in various knowledge systems from personal myths to science, and foregrounds the role of objects in orchestrating a relational, performative reality. She has exhibited at Subtitled, New York; SeMA Storage at Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul; Art Space Seogyeo, Seoul; Amado Art Space, Seoul; Alternate Space Loop, Seoul; Humor Garmgot, Seoul; and POST Gallery, Seoul. 

What is the nature of attention experienced through craft? This course takes as its starting thread the practice of textile creation. These practices are often associated with the creation of utilitarian objects, but in this course, we will explore an alternative utility for craft: its potential as a sanctuary for attention. We will discover how the "patchworked” attention of textile craft can be capaciously attuned to the varying rhythms of our social fabric and consider how to (literally) mend the fracturing of attention.

We will build a collective definition of craft epistemology as we learn (or continue to practice) stitching and weaving skills. We will develop textile techniques in a way that emphasizes the vitality of process over a finished product, consider the labor hidden within the objects around us, and cultivate a flexible form of attention to occupy the lulls where it is most vulnerable to exploitation. By inhabiting the attentional sanctuary that is the stitching circle (in which we will hold a seminar conversation as we work) we will practice an attention that can stretch, knot, fray, and reweave itself—together—without being torn away.

Led by Kathleen Quaintance, textile teacher and PhD candidate in history of art at Yale University.

ENROLL HERE!

RSVP HERE!

Celebrating the launch of Attensity!, the Strother School of Radical Attention (SoRA) holds a series of four participatory events where we will collectively create and test-drive vessels for human attention. Over the course of four weeks, four hosts will activate the Sanctuary Gallery in DUMBO with sound, film, objects and movement, and lecture performance. 

In this participatory installation and performance, John Tsung & Leah Ogawa stretch the capacity of attention beyond individual beings and events to the inevitable web of karmic entanglements, manifesting as a site-specific installation which attendees will collectively weave and unravel. 

Image: Leah Ogawa and John Tsung, Divine Generations vol.02, 2023, courtesy of the artists and photographed by Chika Kobari

About the artists

John Tsung (New York, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, and writer whose works explore migration and myth, particularly the concepts of transmigration and impermanence. Drawing on social practice and sound art, his works often involve emergent sounds and the creation of site-specific performance pieces, influenced by his Buddhist upbringing and classical training. Tsung’s installations and works have been performed in the US and Asia and featured in publications such as BOMB Magazine, Interview, and The New York Times. 

Leah Ogawa is an installation artist and puppeteer based in New York City. Raised in Yamanashi, Japan, Leah has worked with puppeteers, artists, and companies including The Metropolitan Opera, La MaMa, Dmitry Krymov, Phantom Limb, Dan Hurlin, Tom Lee, Nami Yamamoto, Loco 7, and others. She has performed across the US as well as at the Quay Branly in Paris and across Asia. Leah is a recipient of the Jim Henson Foundation’s workshop grant for her original piece, Growing Not Dying. Her recent work, Divine Generations with co-creator John Tsung, has been featured in the New York Times.

Mary Oliver once confessed, “I don’t know what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention.” Are we sure prayer and attention are so different? Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic, wrote that prayer is “the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God,” and that “the quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of prayer.”

This seminar takes Weil’s challenge seriously. We will exercise attention through the close reading of prayerful writing from the Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim traditions—from the ecstatic Sufi poetry of Rumi and Hafez to the contemplative philosophy of Martin Buber and Franz Kafka. We will attend closely to the language that creates and sustains the pursuit of divine connection through a variety of attentional practices: reading and re-reading, aloud and in silence, repeating sentences like mantras until we glimpse their meaning and, if we are lucky, the deeper experience beneath them. How can attention to texts bring us closer to the divine?

Led by Julia Kornberg, novelist and PhD candidate in Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University.

ENROLL HERE!

What is the nature of attention experienced through craft? This course takes as its starting thread the practice of textile creation. These practices are often associated with the creation of utilitarian objects, but in this course, we will explore an alternative utility for craft: its potential as a sanctuary for attention. We will discover how the "patchworked” attention of textile craft can be capaciously attuned to the varying rhythms of our social fabric and consider how to (literally) mend the fracturing of attention.

We will build a collective definition of craft epistemology as we learn (or continue to practice) stitching and weaving skills. We will develop textile techniques in a way that emphasizes the vitality of process over a finished product, consider the labor hidden within the objects around us, and cultivate a flexible form of attention to occupy the lulls where it is most vulnerable to exploitation. By inhabiting the attentional sanctuary that is the stitching circle (in which we will hold a seminar conversation as we work) we will practice an attention that can stretch, knot, fray, and reweave itself—together—without being torn away.

Led by Kathleen Quaintance, textile teacher and PhD candidate in history of art at Yale University.

RSVP HERE!

Celebrating the launch of Attensity!, the Strother School of Radical Attention (SoRA) holds a series of four participatory events where we will collectively create and test-drive vessels for human attention. Over the course of four weeks, four hosts will activate the Sanctuary Gallery in DUMBO with sound, film, objects and movement, and lecture performance. 

This screening of a selection of Indigenous films, followed by an open discussion session, spotlights the radical attention adopted by makers and viewers of revolutionary film. We will explore techniques of filmmaking that subvert the passive gaze, and the capacity of screening/watching for catalyzing collective movement-making.

Image: Ruben Gamez, La Fórmula Secreta, 1965, Mexico. Still image.

About the artist

Emily Uruchima (New York, NY) is a Kichwa researcher born and raised on Lenapehoking territory, and currently a researcher at American Social History Project. Much of Emily’s current research and work revolves around uplifting Indigenous communities, which have historically been silenced in large public institutions. Since 2015, Emily has been organizing with Kichwa youth across Turtle Island working on language revitalization projects and moving image archiving and preservation work. 

This event continues on Saturday February 28 with a screening of Tercer Cine films by Ana Begoña Armengod.

Mary Oliver once confessed, “I don’t know what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention.” Are we sure prayer and attention are so different? Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic, wrote that prayer is “the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God,” and that “the quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of prayer.”

This seminar takes Weil’s challenge seriously. We will exercise attention through the close reading of prayerful writing from the Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim traditions—from the ecstatic Sufi poetry of Rumi and Hafez to the contemplative philosophy of Martin Buber and Franz Kafka. We will attend closely to the language that creates and sustains the pursuit of divine connection through a variety of attentional practices: reading and re-reading, aloud and in silence, repeating sentences like mantras until we glimpse their meaning and, if we are lucky, the deeper experience beneath them. How can attention to texts bring us closer to the divine?

Led by Julia Kornberg, novelist and PhD candidate in Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University.

What is the nature of attention experienced through craft? This course takes as its starting thread the practice of textile creation. These practices are often associated with the creation of utilitarian objects, but in this course, we will explore an alternative utility for craft: its potential as a sanctuary for attention. We will discover how the "patchworked” attention of textile craft can be capaciously attuned to the varying rhythms of our social fabric and consider how to (literally) mend the fracturing of attention.

We will build a collective definition of craft epistemology as we learn (or continue to practice) stitching and weaving skills. We will develop textile techniques in a way that emphasizes the vitality of process over a finished product, consider the labor hidden within the objects around us, and cultivate a flexible form of attention to occupy the lulls where it is most vulnerable to exploitation. By inhabiting the attentional sanctuary that is the stitching circle (in which we will hold a seminar conversation as we work) we will practice an attention that can stretch, knot, fray, and reweave itself—together—without being torn away.

Led by Kathleen Quaintance, textile teacher and PhD candidate in history of art at Yale University.

In an exploitative economy where our attention is constantly pulled, optimized, and commodified, many of us find ourselves living in survival mode—trying simply to avoid the habits and platforms that leave us drained. But is there a way to move beyond “not doing the bad stuff” and actually flourish in a culture that so often treats our attention as a resource to extract?

This seminar explores flourishing as a practice of attention rather than a goal. Drawing on thinkers like William James, Natasha Dow Schüll, Matthieu Ricard, and Dacher Keltner, as well as the newest psychological research on happiness, we'll look at how habits, technologies, emotions, the body, and the extent of our connection with others and the environment impact our quality of attention and, as a direct result, our quality of life. 

We will leave this course with a rich and practical understanding of the psychology of flourishing and happiness, as well as concrete strategies to implement this understanding into our everyday lives.

Led by Maia Pujara, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Sarah Lawrence College.

ENROLL HERE!

RSVP HERE!

Celebrating the launch of Attensity!, the Strother School of Radical Attention (SoRA) holds a series of four participatory events where we will collectively create and test-drive vessels for human attention. Over the course of four weeks, four hosts will activate the Sanctuary Gallery in DUMBO with sound, film, objects and movement, and lecture performance. 

On February 22, visual artist and educator Taeyoon Choi presents Cotton King and A.I. God, a lecture performance unpacking the hidden ties between the cotton industry and A.I. Taeyoon guides us through his research with a custom interactive tool and music, making accessible connections between vast temporal and spatial distances while conveying the complexity of relationships between big tech and invisible labor. We will move through the attentional paths created by his alternative historical map, navigating the shadows of technologies which may at first glance appear ahistorical. 

This performance debuted at Seoul National University in November 2025, and a related site-specific work is featured in the exhibition Technology of Relations at MASS MoCA, on view from February 21.

Image: Taeyoon Choi, Cotton King A.I. God, Acrylics on Canvas, 2025. Courtesy of the artist

About the artist

Taeyoon Choi (Detroit, MI) explores the poetics of science, technology, society, and human relations. He works with computer programming, drawing, and writing, oftentimes in collaboration with fellow artists, experts and community members. His projects, participatory workshops, performances, and installations were presented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, Van Alen Institute, M+ Museum and more. Choi co-founded the School for Poetic Computation and taught classes there until 2020. Currently, he teaches Digital Art at Wayne State University, and serves on the board of AFIELD, an international network of changemakers.  

Mary Oliver once confessed, “I don’t know what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention.” Are we sure prayer and attention are so different? Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic, wrote that prayer is “the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God,” and that “the quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of prayer.”

This seminar takes Weil’s challenge seriously. We will exercise attention through the close reading of prayerful writing from the Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim traditions—from the ecstatic Sufi poetry of Rumi and Hafez to the contemplative philosophy of Martin Buber and Franz Kafka. We will attend closely to the language that creates and sustains the pursuit of divine connection through a variety of attentional practices: reading and re-reading, aloud and in silence, repeating sentences like mantras until we glimpse their meaning and, if we are lucky, the deeper experience beneath them. How can attention to texts bring us closer to the divine?

Led by Julia Kornberg, novelist and PhD candidate in Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University.

In an exploitative economy where our attention is constantly pulled, optimized, and commodified, many of us find ourselves living in survival mode—trying simply to avoid the habits and platforms that leave us drained. But is there a way to move beyond “not doing the bad stuff” and actually flourish in a culture that so often treats our attention as a resource to extract?

This seminar explores flourishing as a practice of attention rather than a goal. Drawing on thinkers like William James, Natasha Dow Schüll, Matthieu Ricard, and Dacher Keltner, as well as the newest psychological research on happiness, we'll look at how habits, technologies, emotions, the body, and the extent of our connection with others and the environment impact our quality of attention and, as a direct result, our quality of life. 

We will leave this course with a rich and practical understanding of the psychology of flourishing and happiness, as well as concrete strategies to implement this understanding into our everyday lives.

Led by Maia Pujara, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Sarah Lawrence College.

RSVP HERE!

Celebrating the launch of Attensity!, the Strother School of Radical Attention (SoRA) holds a series of four participatory events where we will collectively create and test-drive vessels for human attention. Over the course of four weeks, four hosts will activate the Sanctuary Gallery in DUMBO with sound, film, objects and movement, and lecture performance. 

This screening of a selection of Tercer Cine films, followed by an open discussion session, spotlights the radical attention adopted by makers and viewers of revolutionary film. We will explore techniques of filmmaking that subvert the passive gaze, and the capacity of screening/watching for catalyzing collective movement-making. 

Image: Ruben Gamez, La Fórmula Secreta, 1965, Mexico. Still image.

About the artist

Ana Begoña Armengod (Philadelphia, PA) is a Mexican multidisciplinary artist born in Mazatlán Sinaloa. Her art encompasses a wide range of mediums including film, illustration, writing, sculpture, installation, and sound. Her work is tied with nature and its death, as well as the small details that get lost in the bigger picture. Focused on accentuating the overlooked and unimportant, she gives magnitude to human reactions, history, emotion, and the environment while questioning how these things push us to evolve.

Brian Eno famously claimed his 1979 album Music for Airports to be “as ignorable as it is interesting.” Eno was hardly the first to make music meant to create an environment rather than engage a listener. Telemann’s Musique de Table, Erik Satie’s “furniture music,” early 20th-century Muzak, and Japan’s 1980s “environmental music” all reveal a long lineage of composers using sound to contour experience—often unconsciously. What do these practices tell us about how sound organizes our sense of space and, as a result, our attention?

This course explores ambient music as a technology of attention. We’ll listen closely to how these works are constructed, how they unfold through time, and how they reorient (or disorient) our bodies and minds. What does music do when it isn’t asking to be “listened to”?

We’ll spend time with composers such as Brian Eno, Harold Budd, and Hiroshi Yoshimura, and students of all musical backgrounds (no experience necessary) will be invited to experiment with improvisation and composition using laptops, instruments, and voice. 

Led by performance artist-composer Nicholas Miller and musician Julie Hill.

ENROLL HERE!

In an exploitative economy where our attention is constantly pulled, optimized, and commodified, many of us find ourselves living in survival mode—trying simply to avoid the habits and platforms that leave us drained. But is there a way to move beyond “not doing the bad stuff” and actually flourish in a culture that so often treats our attention as a resource to extract?

This seminar explores flourishing as a practice of attention rather than a goal. Drawing on thinkers like William James, Natasha Dow Schüll, Matthieu Ricard, and Dacher Keltner, as well as the newest psychological research on happiness, we'll look at how habits, technologies, emotions, the body, and the extent of our connection with others and the environment impact our quality of attention and, as a direct result, our quality of life. 

We will leave this course with a rich and practical understanding of the psychology of flourishing and happiness, as well as concrete strategies to implement this understanding into our everyday lives.

Led by Maia Pujara, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Sarah Lawrence College.

Brian Eno famously claimed his 1979 album Music for Airports to be “as ignorable as it is interesting.” Eno was hardly the first to make music meant to create an environment rather than engage a listener. Telemann’s Musique de Table, Erik Satie’s “furniture music,” early 20th-century Muzak, and Japan’s 1980s “environmental music” all reveal a long lineage of composers using sound to contour experience—often unconsciously. What do these practices tell us about how sound organizes our sense of space and, as a result, our attention?

This course explores ambient music as a technology of attention. We’ll listen closely to how these works are constructed, how they unfold through time, and how they reorient (or disorient) our bodies and minds. What does music do when it isn’t asking to be “listened to”?

We’ll spend time with composers such as Brian Eno, Harold Budd, and Hiroshi Yoshimura, and students of all musical backgrounds (no experience necessary) will be invited to experiment with improvisation and composition using laptops, instruments, and voice. 

Led by performance artist-composer Nicholas Miller and musician Julie Hill.

A complex system is neither chaotic nor ordered—it is both at once. How do complex systems shape our attention? What kinds of attention help us sense, navigate, and participate in them?

This seminar explores complexity as a lens with which to look at a world caught between the “chaos” of AI slop, polarized discourse, and narrative collapse, and the “order” of authoritarian politics, corporate conformity, and techno-optimized efficiency. What “third way” can one savvy in complexity find through this impossible forest?

Through readings, discussion, and hands-on experiments—and guided by thinkers like Neil Theise, Nora Bateson, and James P. Carse—we’ll address these questions as we give close attention to complex systems. We will see how concepts like emergence, feedback, and interdependence are all key to understanding our experience of this (often overwhelmingly) complex moment. Along the way, we’ll consider how a lens of complexity, as Cybernetician Norbert Wiener put it, can help us “pursue the uphill battle against the prevailing tendency towards the commonplace and banal.”

Led by writer and media theorist Anna Beth Lane.

ENROLL HERE!

Brian Eno famously claimed his 1979 album Music for Airports to be “as ignorable as it is interesting.” Eno was hardly the first to make music meant to create an environment rather than engage a listener. Telemann’s Musique de Table, Erik Satie’s “furniture music,” early 20th-century Muzak, and Japan’s 1980s “environmental music” all reveal a long lineage of composers using sound to contour experience—often unconsciously. What do these practices tell us about how sound organizes our sense of space and, as a result, our attention?

This course explores ambient music as a technology of attention. We’ll listen closely to how these works are constructed, how they unfold through time, and how they reorient (or disorient) our bodies and minds. What does music do when it isn’t asking to be “listened to”?

We’ll spend time with composers such as Brian Eno, Harold Budd, and Hiroshi Yoshimura, and students of all musical backgrounds (no experience necessary) will be invited to experiment with improvisation and composition using laptops, instruments, and voice. 

Led by performance artist-composer Nicholas Miller and musician Julie Hill.

A complex system is neither chaotic nor ordered—it is both at once. How do complex systems shape our attention? What kinds of attention help us sense, navigate, and participate in them?

This seminar explores complexity as a lens with which to look at a world caught between the “chaos” of AI slop, polarized discourse, and narrative collapse, and the “order” of authoritarian politics, corporate conformity, and techno-optimized efficiency. What “third way” can one savvy in complexity find through this impossible forest?

Through readings, discussion, and hands-on experiments—and guided by thinkers like Neil Theise, Nora Bateson, and James P. Carse—we’ll address these questions as we give close attention to complex systems. We will see how concepts like emergence, feedback, and interdependence are all key to understanding our experience of this (often overwhelmingly) complex moment. Along the way, we’ll consider how a lens of complexity, as Cybernetician Norbert Wiener put it, can help us “pursue the uphill battle against the prevailing tendency towards the commonplace and banal.”

Led by writer and media theorist Anna Beth Lane.

Diane di Prima writes: “The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All other wars are subsumed in it.” If radical attentionis the reclaiming of those diverse forms of human attention that resist being commodified, then radical imagination is the reclaiming of our embodied human capacity to freely explore and experience possibility.

Like attention, imagination has come to be defined only by its most reductive and profit-generating forms. Rather than myths resonating with our unconscious lifeworld, we have Instagram “stories” activating our limbic system. In place of make-believe, we have photo filters and ready-made virtual realities. We open mindless, repetitive phone games and call that play. This is a crisis of the inner world: we are losing touch with our innate capacity to imagine and, therefore, to make change.

Drawing on the work of CG Jung, Ruha Benjamin, and William Blake among others, this course seeks to understand how we became alienated from this essential facet of our humanity and how we might enrich ourselves by its recovery. Our journey will take us from depth psychology and visionary poetry through theatrical improvisation and role-play, landing at last on workable strategies for a rebellion of the human imagination.

Led by Henry Kramer, Religious Studies professor at Hunter College and Academic Dean of SoRA.

ENROLL HERE!

A complex system is neither chaotic nor ordered—it is both at once. How do complex systems shape our attention? What kinds of attention help us sense, navigate, and participate in them?

This seminar explores complexity as a lens with which to look at a world caught between the “chaos” of AI slop, polarized discourse, and narrative collapse, and the “order” of authoritarian politics, corporate conformity, and techno-optimized efficiency. What “third way” can one savvy in complexity find through this impossible forest?

Through readings, discussion, and hands-on experiments—and guided by thinkers like Neil Theise, Nora Bateson, and James P. Carse—we’ll address these questions as we give close attention to complex systems. We will see how concepts like emergence, feedback, and interdependence are all key to understanding our experience of this (often overwhelmingly) complex moment. Along the way, we’ll consider how a lens of complexity, as Cybernetician Norbert Wiener put it, can help us “pursue the uphill battle against the prevailing tendency towards the commonplace and banal.”

Led by writer and media theorist Anna Beth Lane.

Diane di Prima writes: “The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All other wars are subsumed in it.” If radical attentionis the reclaiming of those diverse forms of human attention that resist being commodified, then radical imagination is the reclaiming of our embodied human capacity to freely explore and experience possibility.

Like attention, imagination has come to be defined only by its most reductive and profit-generating forms. Rather than myths resonating with our unconscious lifeworld, we have Instagram “stories” activating our limbic system. In place of make-believe, we have photo filters and ready-made virtual realities. We open mindless, repetitive phone games and call that play. This is a crisis of the inner world: we are losing touch with our innate capacity to imagine and, therefore, to make change.

Drawing on the work of CG Jung, Ruha Benjamin, and William Blake among others, this course seeks to understand how we became alienated from this essential facet of our humanity and how we might enrich ourselves by its recovery. Our journey will take us from depth psychology and visionary poetry through theatrical improvisation and role-play, landing at last on workable strategies for a rebellion of the human imagination.

Led by Henry Kramer, Religious Studies professor at Hunter College and Academic Dean of SoRA.

ENROLL HERE!

What tools are available to the documentarian when cameras fail or are forbidden? How and what can we record when our subject is absent, inaccessible, or censored? More broadly: what does it mean to give our attention to someone or something we are told not to see? 

We begin with the documentary—its forms, limits, and histories—and move toward the problem of how to document those who have been "disappeared" into our systems: individuals in carceral, psychiatric, or immigration detention spaces, and others rendered invisible by public policy, social stigma, or discriminatory law.

Through group discussions, film viewings, short readings, and hands-on experimentation, students will explore techniques such as negative space, sound, drawing, spatial observation, memory, and storytelling to expose the invisible subject. No prior filmmaking experience is required. 

Led by filmmaker and Fulbright Fellow Andrea Sisson.

ENROLL HERE!

Diane di Prima writes: “The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All other wars are subsumed in it.” If radical attentionis the reclaiming of those diverse forms of human attention that resist being commodified, then radical imagination is the reclaiming of our embodied human capacity to freely explore and experience possibility.

Like attention, imagination has come to be defined only by its most reductive and profit-generating forms. Rather than myths resonating with our unconscious lifeworld, we have Instagram “stories” activating our limbic system. In place of make-believe, we have photo filters and ready-made virtual realities. We open mindless, repetitive phone games and call that play. This is a crisis of the inner world: we are losing touch with our innate capacity to imagine and, therefore, to make change.

Drawing on the work of CG Jung, Ruha Benjamin, and William Blake among others, this course seeks to understand how we became alienated from this essential facet of our humanity and how we might enrich ourselves by its recovery. Our journey will take us from depth psychology and visionary poetry through theatrical improvisation and role-play, landing at last on workable strategies for a rebellion of the human imagination.

Led by Henry Kramer, Religious Studies professor at Hunter College and Academic Dean of SoRA.

ENROLL HERE!

What tools are available to the documentarian when cameras fail or are forbidden? How and what can we record when our subject is absent, inaccessible, or censored? More broadly: what does it mean to give our attention to someone or something we are told not to see? 

We begin with the documentary—its forms, limits, and histories—and move toward the problem of how to document those who have been "disappeared" into our systems: individuals in carceral, psychiatric, or immigration detention spaces, and others rendered invisible by public policy, social stigma, or discriminatory law.

Through group discussions, film viewings, short readings, and hands-on experimentation, students will explore techniques such as negative space, sound, drawing, spatial observation, memory, and storytelling to expose the invisible subject. No prior filmmaking experience is required. 

Led by filmmaker and Fulbright Fellow Andrea Sisson.

We slip into trance constantly—doomscrolling, zoning out in meetings, losing track of time in the feed. Most of the trances we enter are engineered to harness our attention for someone else’s profit. But what if we learned to enter trance on purpose, to redirect that same faculty toward our own transformation?

This seminar treats hypnosis as a practice of attentional sovereignty: the deliberate use of focused awareness to create a state change in consciousness. Drawing from Daniel Siegel’s interpersonal neurobiology, Lisa Feldman-Barrett’s work on the brain, and Jonathan Gottschall’s concept of the "storytelling mind," we’ll consider critical perspectives on trance as a bodily, mystical, and relational phenomenon—a mode of perception through which the self becomes porous and new potentials more accessible.

Through guided exercises, demonstrations, and group practice, participants will critically situate hypnosis traditions within a broader cultural context, experience trance phenomena firsthand, and explore their uses for creativity and self-direction. Together we’ll ask: how might reclaiming our attention become an act of resistance—one that brings us closer to a world we choose?

Led by hypnosis educator Désirée Eckert.

ENROLL NOW!

What tools are available to the documentarian when cameras fail or are forbidden? How and what can we record when our subject is absent, inaccessible, or censored? More broadly: what does it mean to give our attention to someone or something we are told not to see? 

We begin with the documentary—its forms, limits, and histories—and move toward the problem of how to document those who have been "disappeared" into our systems: individuals in carceral, psychiatric, or immigration detention spaces, and others rendered invisible by public policy, social stigma, or discriminatory law.

Through group discussions, film viewings, short readings, and hands-on experimentation, students will explore techniques such as negative space, sound, drawing, spatial observation, memory, and storytelling to expose the invisible subject. No prior filmmaking experience is required. 

Led by filmmaker and Fulbright Fellow Andrea Sisson.

We slip into trance constantly—doomscrolling, zoning out in meetings, losing track of time in the feed. Most of the trances we enter are engineered to harness our attention for someone else’s profit. But what if we learned to enter trance on purpose, to redirect that same faculty toward our own transformation?

This seminar treats hypnosis as a practice of attentional sovereignty: the deliberate use of focused awareness to create a state change in consciousness. Drawing from Daniel Siegel’s interpersonal neurobiology, Lisa Feldman-Barrett’s work on the brain, and Jonathan Gottschall’s concept of the "storytelling mind," we’ll consider critical perspectives on trance as a bodily, mystical, and relational phenomenon—a mode of perception through which the self becomes porous and new potentials more accessible.

Through guided exercises, demonstrations, and group practice, participants will critically situate hypnosis traditions within a broader cultural context, experience trance phenomena firsthand, and explore their uses for creativity and self-direction. Together we’ll ask: how might reclaiming our attention become an act of resistance—one that brings us closer to a world we choose?

Led by hypnosis educator Désirée Eckert.

In the 1960s, a broad coalition of activists responded to the mounting destruction of the natural environment with a slogan of ECOLOGY NOW!, the tagline for a political movement that recognized the material interdependence of human and non-human life. Now, in the 2020s, the rise of another extractive industry is driving a parallel paradigm shift, one concerned not with the "outer" environment of air and water, but with the "inner" environment of the mind and senses. Its rallying cry? ATTENSITY NOW!

This seminar positions human fracking and climate crisis as interrelated threats to human existence in the twenty-first century. To explore the material and metaphorical relationships between attention activism and environmental politics, we will draw on texts by Rob Nixon, Zadie Smith, Traci Brynne Voyles, and others. Through group discussions and practices, we'll seek to develop a vocabulary and framework for joint efforts at the nexus of attention activism and ecological repair.

Led by Peter Schmidt, writer and Program Director at the Strother School of Radical Attention.

ENROLL NOW!

We slip into trance constantly—doomscrolling, zoning out in meetings, losing track of time in the feed. Most of the trances we enter are engineered to harness our attention for someone else’s profit. But what if we learned to enter trance on purpose, to redirect that same faculty toward our own transformation?

This seminar treats hypnosis as a practice of attentional sovereignty: the deliberate use of focused awareness to create a state change in consciousness. Drawing from Daniel Siegel’s interpersonal neurobiology, Lisa Feldman-Barrett’s work on the brain, and Jonathan Gottschall’s concept of the "storytelling mind," we’ll consider critical perspectives on trance as a bodily, mystical, and relational phenomenon—a mode of perception through which the self becomes porous and new potentials more accessible.

Through guided exercises, demonstrations, and group practice, participants will critically situate hypnosis traditions within a broader cultural context, experience trance phenomena firsthand, and explore their uses for creativity and self-direction. Together we’ll ask: how might reclaiming our attention become an act of resistance—one that brings us closer to a world we choose?

Led by hypnosis educator Désirée Eckert.

In this course, we will embed ourselves in the “feral ecosystems” of New York City. Our topic of study will be WEEDS—the subversive plant life that grows on the outskirts of human attention and in spite of best efforts at their eradication.

We will take plant blindness—our cultural oversight of the diversity, mystery, and uniqueness of flora—as a starting point and an obstacle. Guided in our looking by the theoretical frameworks of Bruno Latour, Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, we’ll let these “unwanted” species become our guides to the city’s overlooked ecologies. What happens when we shift our awareness toward medicinal mugwort pushing up through sidewalk seams, burdock hooking itself to our clothes, or Japanese knotweed weaving across the borders set by chain-link fences? How might these plants, often dismissed as invaders or nuisances, teach us about adaptive intelligence, survival, and reciprocity  and become partners in imagining multispecies urban futures?

Through fieldwork, roundtable discussions, and collaborative art making, we’ll experiment with reclaiming forms of embodied noticing. Our time together will culminate in a collaborative urban-weed field guide that invites students to translate attention into intimacy, rendering these feral companions as thriving co-inhabitants of our stories, our health, and our shared futures.

Led by educator Isabelle Groenewegen and artist-organizer Amy Pekal.

ENROLL HERE!

In the 1960s, a broad coalition of activists responded to the mounting destruction of the natural environment with a slogan of ECOLOGY NOW!, the tagline for a political movement that recognized the material interdependence of human and non-human life. Now, in the 2020s, the rise of another extractive industry is driving a parallel paradigm shift, one concerned not with the "outer" environment of air and water, but with the "inner" environment of the mind and senses. Its rallying cry? ATTENSITY NOW!

This seminar positions human fracking and climate crisis as interrelated threats to human existence in the twenty-first century. To explore the material and metaphorical relationships between attention activism and environmental politics, we will draw on texts by Rob Nixon, Zadie Smith, Traci Brynne Voyles, and others. Through group discussions and practices, we'll seek to develop a vocabulary and framework for joint efforts at the nexus of attention activism and ecological repair.

Led by Peter Schmidt, writer and Program Director at the Strother School of Radical Attention.

In this course, we will embed ourselves in the “feral ecosystems” of New York City. Our topic of study will be WEEDS—the subversive plant life that grows on the outskirts of human attention and in spite of best efforts at their eradication.

We will take plant blindness—our cultural oversight of the diversity, mystery, and uniqueness of flora—as a starting point and an obstacle. Guided in our looking by the theoretical frameworks of Bruno Latour, Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, we’ll let these “unwanted” species become our guides to the city’s overlooked ecologies. What happens when we shift our awareness toward medicinal mugwort pushing up through sidewalk seams, burdock hooking itself to our clothes, or Japanese knotweed weaving across the borders set by chain-link fences? How might these plants, often dismissed as invaders or nuisances, teach us about adaptive intelligence, survival, and reciprocity  and become partners in imagining multispecies urban futures?

Through fieldwork, roundtable discussions, and collaborative art making, we’ll experiment with reclaiming forms of embodied noticing. Our time together will culminate in a collaborative urban-weed field guide that invites students to translate attention into intimacy, rendering these feral companions as thriving co-inhabitants of our stories, our health, and our shared futures.

Led by educator Isabelle Groenewegen and artist-organizer Amy Pekal.

In the 1960s, a broad coalition of activists responded to the mounting destruction of the natural environment with a slogan of ECOLOGY NOW!, the tagline for a political movement that recognized the material interdependence of human and non-human life. Now, in the 2020s, the rise of another extractive industry is driving a parallel paradigm shift, one concerned not with the "outer" environment of air and water, but with the "inner" environment of the mind and senses. Its rallying cry? ATTENSITY NOW!

This seminar positions human fracking and climate crisis as interrelated threats to human existence in the twenty-first century. To explore the material and metaphorical relationships between attention activism and environmental politics, we will draw on texts by Rob Nixon, Zadie Smith, Traci Brynne Voyles, and others. Through group discussions and practices, we'll seek to develop a vocabulary and framework for joint efforts at the nexus of attention activism and ecological repair.

Led by Peter Schmidt, writer and Program Director at the Strother School of Radical Attention.

In this course, we will embed ourselves in the “feral ecosystems” of New York City. Our topic of study will be WEEDS—the subversive plant life that grows on the outskirts of human attention and in spite of best efforts at their eradication.

We will take plant blindness—our cultural oversight of the diversity, mystery, and uniqueness of flora—as a starting point and an obstacle. Guided in our looking by the theoretical frameworks of Bruno Latour, Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, we’ll let these “unwanted” species become our guides to the city’s overlooked ecologies. What happens when we shift our awareness toward medicinal mugwort pushing up through sidewalk seams, burdock hooking itself to our clothes, or Japanese knotweed weaving across the borders set by chain-link fences? How might these plants, often dismissed as invaders or nuisances, teach us about adaptive intelligence, survival, and reciprocity  and become partners in imagining multispecies urban futures?

Through fieldwork, roundtable discussions, and collaborative art making, we’ll experiment with reclaiming forms of embodied noticing. Our time together will culminate in a collaborative urban-weed field guide that invites students to translate attention into intimacy, rendering these feral companions as thriving co-inhabitants of our stories, our health, and our shared futures.

Led by educator Isabelle Groenewegen and artist-organizer Amy Pekal.