Attention After Technology

Attention After Technology is a group exhibition with newly commissioned works exploring the relationships between attention, algorithms, and social justice.

Artists: biarritzzz, Vivian Caccuri, Shu Lea Cheang, Kyriaki Goni, CUSS Group, Femke Herregraven, Berenice Olmedo 

Founded in a collaboration between Kunsthall Trondheim, Art Hub Copenhagen, Tropical Papers, State of Concept Athens, and Swiss Institute New York, with The Friends of Attention, D. Graham Burnett (Princeton University), Justin Smith-Ruiu (Université de Paris) as associated partners.

The two-year collaborative project Attention After Technology explores how algorithms affect us and how we could imagine them otherwise, through newly commissioned works by seven international artists. The artists consider how our attention is commodified and monetized, examine how algorithms reinforce bias while also probing their emancipatory potential, and analyze attention as a political space to foster sustained critical thinking and to support collective action.

The exhibition title, Attention After Technology, is a reference to Ruha Benjamin’s celebrated book Race After Technology (2019). In her publication, Benjamin decodes the discriminatory designs embedded in algorithms that prop up racial, socioeconomic, and other systemic hierarchies. Attention is a much discussed topic with regard to technology. It is closely connected to epistemic justice, or the creation and recognition of diverse forms of knowledge, experiences, and perspectives. Our capacity as knowing subjects, and being recognized as such, is an essential component of agency and our ability for choice. It is crucial for social justice.

In the lead-up to the exhibition, which considers these intersections, the artists participated in regular online meetings to workshop their artworks with the exhibition curators, the associated partner collective The Friends of Attention (an informal network of creative collaborators), and advisors from diverse disciplines including computer science and artificial intelligence, visual arts, and queer and trans technology studies. Berenice Olmedo’s projection coming out of a keratometer (an ophthalmic testing device) delves into the continued emphasis on our optical sense in engaging with digital spaces. Via the metaphor of visual acuity, Olmedo evokes surveillance capitalism’s use of biometric identification as well as issues of profiling and data privacy. biarritzzz’s video installation surveys tactics ranging from opacity to hypervisibility, as well as tensions between privacy and overexposure, in the memetic spread of Brazilian baile funk choreographies created by TikTok users. CUSS Group’s video examines social media as a connecting link between consumerism and societal disintegration in urban contemporary South Africa, prompting questions regarding these platforms’ potential for activism. Femke Herregraven’s work brings together issues surrounding the voice, breath, disease, and death with AI. Her work explores machine learning programs trained on language and the absence thereof in human vocalizations during illness that are located outside the spectrum of standardized communication. Kyriaki Goni’s installation connects the effects of extractive algorithms with the ecological and social fallouts of mining, drawing attention to the links between the colonization of bodies and space, both digital and physical. Shu Lea Cheang’s animation and interactive candy dispenser examine AI alignment—a process aimed to attune AI with human ethics—raising the question of who gets to decide its common ground, and critiquing monolithic value systems which may silence, or gag, diversity and individuality. Vivian Caccuri investigates the role of technology for our understandings of the past, ancestry, and close relationships through one of the earliest facial recognition technologies and text-to-speech tools in a sound work and in a series of drawings.

While distraction and fragmentation may seem like antonyms of attention, the exhibition resists such simple dichotomies. Far from luddites opposing technology, the exhibiting artists both use and hack, celebrate and critique, discard and invent new tools. The exhibition explores attention as a practice, as an embodied technology, and as an evolving aesthetic, social, and political sphere. In bringing attention into debates around algorithmic justice, the works in Attention After Technology pull back the curtain on the neutrality of technology, while using it to draft new ways of relating.

This exhibition is the first of three expressions of the expansive project, spanning over two years (2022–2024). The exhibition will travel from Trondheim to State of Concept Athens (February 24, 2024–April 27, 2024). Online versions of the artworks will be shown on Tropical Papers’ web platform from the end of November 2023. The associated symposium “The Digital Divide—Attention, Algorithms and Social Justice”, coordinated by Art Hub Copenhagen in partnership with IDA—the Danish Society of Engineers and TOASTER, took place on 4 May 2023, while Art Hub also hosted two artist residencies, with biarritzzz and CUSS Group. The overall project also includes curatorial and strategic contributions by Swiss Institute New York.

The exhibition is collectively curated by Kunsthall Trondheim’s team: Katrine Elise Agpalza Pedersen, curator and project lead “Attention After Technology” with Stefanie Hessler; Liz Dom, project manager; Kaja Grefslie Waagen, producer and communications manager; and Art Hub Copenhagen: Lars Bang Larsen, head of art & research; Rose Tygat, project coordinator; and Tropical Papers: María Inés Rodríguez; and State of Concept Athens: iLiana Fokianaki, founder and director; Konstantina Melachrinou, production manager and press officer; and Swiss Institute New York: Stefanie Hessler, director, curatorial concept and project lead “Attention After Technology” with Katrine Elise Agpalza Pedersen.

Project Coordinator: Kunsthall Trondheim
The project is led by: Kunsthall Trondheim and Swiss Institute New York
Project Partners: Art Hub Copenhagen, Tropical Papers and State of Concept Athens
Associated Partners: The Friends of Attention, D. Graham Burnett (Princeton University), Justin Smith-Ruiu (Université de Paris), and Swiss Institute New York
Funded by the European Union.

Artist advisors: Pedro Victor Brandão, Kate Crawford, Flavia Dzodan, Whit Pow, Joana Souza
Project ambassador Trondheim: Gulabuddin Sukhanwar

The online talk series “Attention After Technology” is hosted in collaboration with Tropical Papers’ Sunday Brunch. The panel “Artificial intelligence – the people behind the machines” is in collaboration with Transcultural Arts Production (TrAP).

Events (all times in CEST)
Round table: Artist conversation in Kunsthall Trondheim, October 13, 5:30-6:15pm 
Stefanie Hessler (Swiss Institute) and Katrine Elise Agpalza Pedersen (Kunsthall Trondheim) in conversation with biarritzzz, Femke Herregraven and Berenice Olmedo

Online artist talk: Shu Lea Cheang, November 16, 6–7pm 
Stefanie Hessler (Swiss Institute) in conversation with Shu Lea Cheang and her project advisor Whit Pow

Online artist talk: CUSS Group, December 3, 6–7pm 
Lars Bang Larsen (Art Hub Copenhagen) in conversation with CUSS Group

Panel “Artificial intelligence – the people behind the machines” in Kunsthall Trondheim, December 7, 7–8pm 
Lara Okafor and Letizia Jaccheri, moderated by Namra Saleem

Online artist talk: biarritzzz, January 28, 6–7pm 
María Inés Rodríguez (Tropical Papers) in conversation with biarritzzz

Online artist talk: Kyriaki Goni, February 29, 6:30–7:30pm 
iLiana Fokianaki (State of Concept Athens) in conversation with Kyriaki Goni

Attention After Technology is funded by the European Union, and supported by SpareBank 1 SMN, Arts and Culture Norway, The Fritt Ord Foundation, and Mondriaan Fund.

Kunsthall Trondheim is supported by the Norwegian Ministry of Culture, Trondheim kommune, and Trøndelag fylkeskommune/Trööndelagen fylhkentjïelte.