Attentional Modes

Core Program 2017–18
Becoming Media

Conference 3: Attentional Modes

—a conference organized by Sarah Tindal Kareem, University of California, Los Angeles, and Davide Panagia, University of California, Los Angeles

Despite the absence of a clearly articulated concept of medium, new ways of transmitting thought proliferated in the early modern period, as did reflection on the meaning of these new forms. This series of conferences investigates the objects, practices, and modes of attention associated with these new modes of communication and expression in the early modern and modern periods.

The third conference investigates how given media privilege or encourage particular modes of engagement such as play, immersion, or diffused attention. Participants may approach this problem diachronically or synchronically, whether considering the history of a particular attentional mode or examining the attentional constraints and opportunities afforded by various media forms in a given historical moment.

Image
Parmigianino, 1503–1540
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
Oil on convex panel, ca. 1524
Kunsthistorisches Museum

Speakers
Nathan Gies, Ahmanson-Getty Fellow
John Guillory, New York University
Jonathan Kramnick, Yale University
Emily C. Nacol, University of Toronto
Martin Nitsche, Czech Academy of Sciences
Marisa Parham, Amherst College

Program

9:30 a.m. Morning Coffee and Registration

10:00 a.m. Helen Deutsch, University of California, Los Angeles
Welcome

Sarah Tindal Kareem and Davide Panagia, University of California, Los Angeles Opening Remarks

10:15 a.m. Session 1
Moderator: Angelina Del Balzo, Ph.D. Candidate, University of California, Los Angeles

John Guillory, New York University
“Reading Screens: I. A. Richards as Media Theorist”

11:00 a.m. Jonathan Kramnick, Yale University
“Airports and Artifacts, Two Kinds of Attention”

11:45 a.m. Coffee Break

12:00 p.m. Emily C. Nacol, University of Toronto
“Attention, Solidarity, Conspiracy?: Insurance Technologies and the Rise of Friendly Societies in 18th-Century Britain”

12:45 p.m. Lunch

2:00 p.m. Session 2
Moderator: Alexander Diones, Ph.D. Candidate, University of California, Los Angeles

Martin Nitsche, Czech Academy of Sciences
“Mediation and Reduction: Medium as a Location in a Transitive-Phenomenological Sphere”

2:45 p.m. Nathan Alan Gies, Ahmanson-Getty Fellow
“Candid Reader, Endangered Mind”

3:30 p.m. Coffee Break

3:45 p.m. Marisa Parham, Amherst College
“Black Digitality and Other Media”

4:30 p.m. Reception