Weekly notes #3 - On grabbing your attention and expanding creativity

Attention and work

As I started triathlon training, I made a habit of skipping workouts for the simple reason that I was tired. I could not identify what had made me tired, why I was tired or at least to identify tools that would get me out of that state so I could go training instead of doomscrolling or cleaning my closet or kitchen for the 43th time this week. I had hit a dead-end but I was not sure how to get out of it. Why was I struggling to do the thing I actually wanted to do and enjoyed – i.e a morning run before work, a night swimming seshion, a simple 45 minute cycle, or a pilates stretch?

Well. Focus and attention was the answer. I was not focused on the workout, nor prioritized its second and third-order benefits, and my attention was being pulled into 324 directions. I would wake up and let my mind wander between the 2230 things I could do instead of a run, then I would lose time, get distracted, it would get late, I had to shower and go quickly and ended up not going on the run that I totally needed. Distracted.

I listened to Chris Hayes’ episode in the Vox podcast and started reading Stolen Focus for the first time. I do not struggle with work focus, but I do struggle in creative and personal focus. I am working on re-shifting my capabilities from work to play, because my individual projects and my wellbeing deserve the same love and intention that my employment endeavors do (this is based on other values that I have come to believe and live by in the past, but it’s a long story for another day).

Though I refuse to frame my failure to focus on purely individual action or guilt – in fact, I think one can only celebrate regaining attention as a personal and moral feat, but the reverse is not true as the world is engineered, at the moment, to grab your attention viciously. Everywhere you look, all the time, everyone wants your attention. That makes it pretty tough to use it wisely and we do need to open the conversation and the toolsets and the mind to understand that resisting the noise is a collective action as much as it is individual. An action of resistance.

In that Chris Hayes interview, the interviewer talks about how it is easier to grab someone's attention than it is to hold their attention. Involuntary attention has a power and an immediacy that you cannot replicate with voluntary attention. So, it's just easier to get attention than it is to hold it. But the twist here is – there is nothing productive or cumulative for you in this game. If Instagram holds your attention, you gain nothing. Maybe a fleeting thought or an idea, okay, but the one that wins is Instagram that now stores your data, sells it, possibly sells you something else, most likely sells you an influencer you can hook onto, and then keep the wheel circling. You are the loser, hence your attention is your weapon.

This is all to say that I have been working in my attention, not to (only) be more productive at my own work and play and emotional endeavours, but also to act on my personal value of resistance against the attention economy and the price we pay for it. Since establishing some practices and protocols and just tweaking a few things that weren’t working, I have already noticed heightened attention, space for creativity, and incredible connection-building with IRL people. I put my phone away, I turn off all my notifications and really focus on a few things at a time. Funnily enough, I have never been more productive than now, cramming my calendar with things that really do matter, that are intentional, and removing all the rest. Try it out – let me know if you want my tips and tricks (you might not like them but they work).

Expanding the boundaries of creativity through AI

I have started toying with AI in my practice. I am first using Lovable to build a portfolio from scratch. For this, I’ve had to learn to use GitHub and many other tools that I had never heard before. I have always enjoyed the nerd-out zone coding and technology development puts me into, so for now I am willing to enjoy this re-education. There are many glitches and things I am doing wrong and probably my portfolio will be ugly as hell, but at least it will be an open-source demonstration of how one learns and employs AI to minimize work hours on something that could be automated.

Building portfolios is tedious – it’s never the right thing, and of course you could be doing better, flashier, prettier. Picking a hosting, training yourself on that platforms’ customization options, realizing that you don’t want that anymore just after you paid for a discounted yearly membership. Not enough padding, or flexibility, or complex CSS integrations you are not convinced about. Website builders like squarespace, wordpress or semplice help non-technical users to build digital homes for their projects and democratize access to the internet creation. Yet, their linear approach and limited backend structures will always remit the projects to an amorphous blend of boxes in their desired sizes and forms.

I do feel guilty building my own website from scratch, because I do have developer friends and colleagues that get paid for this. The difference, I’ve realized, is that I never paid anyone to design my personal websites, but instead I paid squarespace, or wordpress, or blogger, or whatnot, a little fee for letting me borrow their code. And well, I want a flexibility that these websites cannot grant me anymore, and I also want to build something fast so I can dedicate my time to actually working (so I can fill in my portfolio…) So I guess, ethically it's not a robots-will-replace-us but a reclaim of my time and attention onto other offline endeavours.

I am also starting to think about how I can use these tools to build speculative websites or repositories. I am not really good with coding, as we know, and I am not a particularly highly skilled graphic designer. But what if these tools do help me materialize certain projects or ideas that can move the needle further in public discourse and social provocation? The hardest part of speculative design is the heavy design-led nature of it. A blessing and a curse. So I hope to put my learnings into work quite soon, and figure out how to leverage AI tools to create visions of future artefacts or realities in a faster, more efficient way. AI assisting me in my thinking and creating, but never replacing me. You wish.

I was very inspired by artist Heessoo Kwon, one of the artists in Huis Marseille’s Shadow Self expo. She used Firefly (an AI program) to extend the frame of pictures taken when they were a child and a toddler. In letting the AI re-imagine what existed in the margins, beyond the frame, Kwon managed to recover some of her childhood memories from her own software (her brain, hehe). They then started piecing some things and faces together and recalls her experience as a personal exploration of her past, assisted by AI. There were many other artists featured so do check it out.

The question is no longer how is AI going to affect our lives and jobs but instead how are we going to strike a good balance between a tool for efficiency versus a tool for total stupidity. I have gotten asked before about doing personas with ChatGPT; the same people that asked this could not be bothered to lay out a proper strategy or think about an action plan that wouldn’t mimic competitors’ playbook. Stupidity is underrated, and overflowing, as economic historian Carlo M. Cipolla explains in his seminal work about stupidity.

What I’m watching, reading, listening to

·      I am currently looking into Blot.im, an AI-assisted tool to create website based on text editor software. Another experiment loading!

·      I listened to this episode of Deep Reading with Phoebe Lovatt featuring Haley Mlotek, about marriage, the institution of the family and the gendered dimensions to togetherness and relationships in this economy. Totally recommend!

·      As mentioned above, one of Cipolla’s diagrams explaining stupidity and its ranges. It is wildly amusing and serious but still very fun. The book is available somewhere in the web as pdf. Be sure to browse it. -n

·      Government innovation repositories like this one, in my quest to get inspired for new ways to provoke collective action and imagination, and use visual resources to mobilise.

·      Climate scenarios for the Netherlands, just out of curiosity and to peek at the methodology, read here.

I have been quite busy and full of ideas, so I’ll try slowly sequence them and write less in a rush like today. Talk soon!

* The thunderstorm by Johannes Tavenraat (1809-1881), oil on panel, 1843

The rapid, powerful brushstrokes make this seem more like a sketch than a completed painting. With this, Tavenraat struck a different path than most Dutch painters of the time. Instead of a smooth painting style and modest sentiment, he chose bright colors and dramatic light-dark effects. As a result, his work was more in line with the international, mainly French, developments in Romantic painting.