Institute for Sustained Attention

In 2018, the 33rd Sao Paulo Art Biennial in Brazil commissioned Princeton University Professor D. Graham Burnett to co-curate an art project on the "Practices of Attention." This resulted in a three-day public symposium that brought together more than 50 international artists, scientists, critics, writers, and scholars who engaged in an interdisciplinary inquiry of collective reading, writing, and interventions to explore and respond to one of the major issues of our time: attention.

In the wake of this gathering, Burnett and several dozen artists, scholars, and activists gathered under the auspices of the Institute for Sustained Attention. Their aim was to focus directly on the "politics of attention" and, through community workshops and curricular projects, to cultivate forms of radical human attention resistant to commodification. They envisioned a more humane, compassionate, just, and empowered future, developing a series of "attention labs": experiential workshops dedicated to the practice and dissemination of radical human attention. These "attention labs" will define the future of attentional activism and identify precious forms of shared human existence, focusing on the creation of "sanctuary" spaces where powerful questions can be examined: the spiritual and physical survival of individuals; the care of the shared earth; the core work of living with each other in just communities.