Attention is All You Need
Key to capitalism, whether you call it ‘selfish capitalism,’ ‘supply-chain economics,’ or ‘techno-feudalism’ is our attention, our grains of attention so far removed from the hourglass of time we can no longer delineate anything. The blur of the real is optimal for the attention market, transforming the smallest change in a jingle or a font into the distractions that shape our desire. The 2017 Machine Learning paper, ‘Attention Is All You Need’ offers a fitting slogan to our era, as well as bringing forth the transformer architecture that allowed generative AI to create shrimp jesus, savior of the Zombie Internet, and so thoroughly grab our attention.
My work explores the destruction and reconstruction of the grid, and the fight for self in late stage capitalism through glitching the processes of printmaking, painting, creative coding and world building. The “Glitch manifests with such variance, generating ruptures between the recognized and recognizable, and amplifying within such ruptures, extending them to become fantastic landscapes of possibility. It is here we open up the opportunity to recognize and realize our selves, 'reflecting' to truly see one another as we more and modify.” (1) The ultimate goal of all my work is to crack the lenses society handed people to view the world with – not to replace that lens with my own dogma but to inspire people to seek understandings of their own. As the field of cognitive sociology explains, we experience the world not only as individuals, but through memberships in various thought communities with distinct culturally specific cognitive traditions (2) that have considerable diversity and political dimensions even within the same culture. Much of the power of these systems is how invisible they are, so that even naming them is a radical act, for “what is default is never neural.” (3)
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(1) Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism
(2) Eviatar Zerubavel, “Cognitive Sociology: between the personal and the universal mind”
(3) Chia Amisola, “Chia Amisola plays the sound of internet ambient (gray area artist salon).”