ATTENTION PRESENCE
Abstract * A conceptual tool for reading looking, visual attention and embodied presence as political relations shaped by property, gender, race, spectatorship and the economy of the image. Keywords * Socioplastics AntoLloveras LAPIEZA-LAB Attention Presence AttentionPresence VisualPedagogy gaze slowlooking image - Essay * AttentionPresence explores the political economy of the gaze in contemporary visual culture. Attention is a scarce resource; its capture and commodification underpin social media, surveillance, and advertising. But John Berger’s Ways of Seeing long ago showed that looking is never innocent—it is gendered, classed, raced, structured by property relations. To look at an oil painting of a nude is to participate in a centuries-old structure of male possession. Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida distinguished between studium (culturally coded, polite attention) and punctum (the detail that wounds, that arrests, that insists on presence). Presence, in this context, is not mere physical proximity but the quality of being held by an image—of refusing to scroll past. Susan Sontag’s On Photography warned that photographs attenuate experience even as they document it; we become tourists in our own lives, collecting images instead of undergoing events. Nicholas Mirzoeff’s right to look counters that visibility can be reclaimed: the counter-history of visuality is one of resistance—enslaved people looking back at the master, protesters filming police, the colonized reversing the ethnographic gaze. Jacques Rancière’s emancipated spectator (consolidated here, removed from AssemblyCommunion) argues that the passive viewer is a fiction; all viewing is composition, all spectatorship is translation. Ontologically, AttentionPresence posits that attention is not a cognitive resource but a political relation: who is trained to look away? Whose gaze is demanded? Methodologically, it requires gaze tracking (interpretive, not just quantitative) and visual attention ethnography—watching how people move through museum galleries, how they scroll Instagram stories, how they avert their eyes from homelessness. Empirical fields include museum pedagogy, social media feed design, documentary film festivals, and protest photography. The proposal is to cultivate slow looking as a political practice: to linger on the image that demands discomfort, to refuse the feed’s rhythm of skipping, to teach attention as a form of solidarity. AttentionPresence thus counters attention extraction with attentive presence.
Bibliography *
Ahmed, S. (2004) ‘Affective Economies’, Social Text, 22(2), pp. 117–139.
Barthes, R. (1980) Camera Lucida. New York: Hill & Wang.
Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing. London: BBC/Penguin.
Citton, Y. (2017) The Ecology of Attention. Cambridge: Polity.
Crary, J. (1999) Suspensions of Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Flusser, V. (1984) Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Göttingen: European Photography.
Lloveras, A. (2026) ‘Visibility Often Arrives Late’, Socioplastics-3207. LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
Mirzoeff, N. (2011) The Right to Look. Durham: Duke University Press.
Mitchell, W.J.T. (1994) Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rancière, J. (2009) The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso.
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