Things I Learned from "The Art of Noticing"

 

Here's Rob Walker's original "How to Pay Attention" article on Medium. He turned it into this book.  Here's his newsletter.  Here is an interview at Core77. Walker teaches a class at the New York's School of Visual Arts in the Products of Design program.

And here are the things I learned from the book.  (lower in the blog post I've listed some favorite quotes and all the references to books and people and ideas I want to follow up with later.) 

Noticing Exercises/ "Practice Paying Attention"

1. Every year, at some point in our class, I ask my students to "practice paying attention" before our next meeting.  There are no other parameters.  Each student resolves this deliberately vague request differently.   
2. As part of a class about color, artist Munro Galloway assigned students a one-hour walk.  "let color be your guide.... what are the colors that you become aware of first? what are the colors that reveal themselves more slowly? what colors do you observe that you did not expect? what color relationships do you notice?"
3. Start a Collection.  George Nelson documented arrows, public clocks, manhole covers, street corners, geometric shapes, ephemeral traces such as footprints (includes tire treads).  Nelson's hunts were sometimes more conceptual - contrast (look for hardness and softness and the contrast between these two qualities." or angles, curves, texture, repetition, contrasts between new and old, natural and built, colorful and drab, crumbling and pristine
4. Count with the numbers you find.  George Nelson created numbers from 1-100.  (here's a slideshow of them.)
5. Slow Art Day.  "Look at five works of art for 10 minutes each, and then meet together over lunch to talk about their experience." Slow Art Day webpage/blog.
   
6. Dan Ariely: "Let's say we go to a bar, and we see people that are dating.  We also notice that the place is noisy, that it's dark, that it's crowded, that there's alcohol: all sound observations. 

   But now, as a social scientist, I want to think of it like a Newtonian physics problem and say: "what are the forces at work?  What pulling people in different directions that is showing up as an interest in being in this place?"

   Maybe going to a noisy place helps people overcome moments of awkward silence.  Maybe being in a loud place allows people to sit closer to each other, and from time to time whisper or talk in each other's ear.  Newtonian Physics in a Crowded Bar.  (see my post here)
7. Sketch a Room you just left. Take in your physical environment carefully, then move to a differnet one.  Now sketch the layout of the room you left.It doesn't need to be a detailed re-creation, but strive to capture the basics of the space, in cluding what is in it -- the positioning of the doors and windows, for instance, and the footprint of the furniture.
8. Look like a historian.  A few years ago, Matthew Frye Jacobson noticed something simultaneously startling and mundane while walking around Midtown Manhattan.  A massive jumotron-style screen offered a looped image: a young woman, bouncing soft-pornishly on a trampoline and flashing an improbable smile.  Titillating or offensive, she was difficult to miss.  What Jacobson, a historian and the chair of American Studies at Yale University, really noticed was how easily we take the likes of Bouncing Jumbotron Woman for granted.  He asked his students to consider a photograph of this spectacle.  At a glance, they could of course tell that the scene was not from 1930s -- or even 1970s -- America.  They also knew, after a moment of reflection, that there ar nations and cultures in the world right now where this scenario couldn't exist.  Jacobson posed a question: What are the preconditions, the things that have to be in place, for this visual to be a casualy accepted part of a public environment? The classroom explore dthe evolution of technology; shifting personal politics and cultrual mores; feminism and antifeminism; varied social normas around sex, advertising...  "There was nothing that I could have told them," Jacobson said, "that would have been as powerful a lesson."
9. Pick a spot, a local park or something, where there are people coming and going.  Sit there for an hour and write down three things you notice about each person that you see.  If there's too many people, just pick one at a time. But just note something.  It can be physcila or less tangible, like the way their voice sounds or the way they laugh or how their shoulders are unched or are they wearing a wedding ring.... You may notice patterns or disruptions of patterns.  You may learn something about yourself in what you notice.  
10. Review the Everyday. My friend Marc Weidenbaum is a music writer, among other things, and he has a very interesting personal ritual.  "I like to review everyday sounds," he explains "as if they were commercial music releases." The whir of an electric toothbrush, the rattly hum of an old taxi, the moan of a foghorn, the purr of cat: He'll think up a descripton of the sound, the context in which it occurred, and 'whatever continuity it's part of (cultural, technological, regional, aesthetic, etc.)" he explains.  "I describe how it functions as a sonic event." He collects his everyday sound "reviews" on his site https://disquiet.com/
    
11. Listen Selectively. Listen Critically.  Ethan Hein, teaches music technology at NYU.  Hein has his students pick a single sound within a song, listen for it, and tune out everything else.  Maybe it's the bass; maybe it's the vocal. Or maybe this means zeroing in on the chorus and identifying each sound within that  Hein makes his students create lists and diagrams of their conclsuions.  What instrument or piece of gear produced that sound?  Who played or programmed it?  Why did they play it as they did?  "Just attending to these sounds is enough for casual fans," hein says. It's less important to identify gear than to land on a subjective description that rings true, such as "that thing that sounds like a seagull." (some artists send out "song stems") Here's Hein's blog filled with music-related postings.
12. Ambient sounds.  ambient sounds are arre not in the foreground, that don't nitrude, but rather those that we normally tune out as irrelevant, like the minor rustling of a plastic bag caught in a tree.  Such incidental noises could be an irritant, but actively seeking them out flipped her perceptoin.  Instead of trying to tune them out, one could collect them. [this reminds me of John Cage's quote: "“Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.”
    —John Cage
13. Take a Sound Shot of Your Neighborhood. Peter Cusack has called his work sonic journalism, an auditory equivalent of photojournalism.  Back in 1998 he started a project called "Favourite sounds of London," a collecting submissions -- short audio clips - from Londoners and posting the results on a dedicate site with a playable map.  This has since inspired similar projects from Berlin to Beijing, and most recently Cusack's own favouritesounds.org site has offered a map of favorite sounds of the British city of Hull: traffic, playground noise, squawking birds, a band at a fair, a public fountain.  Cusack himself has embarked on other projects, notably "sounds from Dangerous Places," collecting audio from environmentally damaged sites around the world.  Rob Walker suggests doing this in your neighborhood.  He calls them "sound shots" (like snapshots).  It makes me recall the Spanish man (Miguel Angel Blanco) in Robert MacFarlane's book The Old Ways who has a library of more than 1,100 books -- "though its books are not only books, but also reliquaries. Each book records a journey made by walking, and each contains natural objects and substances gathered along that particular path: seaweed, snakeskin, mica flakes, crystals of quartz, sea beans, lightning-scorched pine timber, the wing of a grey partridge, pillows of moss, worked flint, cubes of pyrite, pollen, resin, acorn cups, the leaves of holm oak, beech, elm."  (see this website about the "Library of the Forest")
14. Deep Listening.  Pauline Oliveros, who came up with this term, has a short 1974 text called Sonic Meditations.  offers sets of poetic instructions: take a walk at night, walk so silently that the bottom of your feet becomes ears.  In any space you wish, listen to all possible sounds.  When one sound grabs your attention, dwell on it.  Does it end? think about what it reminds you of.  Consider sounds from your past, from dreams, from nature, from music.  Now think of a sound that reminds you of childhood; see if you can find something reminiscent of that sound now.  Dwell on what you find.  Then, return to listening to all sounds at once.  (This seems like a great way to listen to music.  It also reminds me of this Amanda Petrusich New Yorker article reviewing Song Exploder podcast/TV show.)
15. Make a Sound Map. As part of a course on sound in the media landscape, writer Marc Weidenbaum takes his students on a soundwalk.  This is a walking tour of sounds rather than sights.  One such tour began in a market street mall, taking in the retail soundtrack.  Then it headed outside adn moved east on a route punctuated by street chatter, traffice noise, and the occassional siren; paused aoutside the lobby of an exclusive residential building offering "private silence"; considered the auditory effects of the waterfall feature of a MLK memorial; and got interrupted by a street evangelist bellowing through a megaphone.  Students learn to notice not just how sounds work but also where they come from, and when, and why.  Weidenbaum instructs students to identify three sounds in a two-block radius and to 'pin' each sound's origin point on a digital map, describing it and noting its meaning or function.  Should it include the ephemeral and unmoored sounds of a passing bird's squak, an airplane, distant thunder? Or should it stick to more geographically immobile examples: a church bell, a penned rooster, the warning horn of a drawbridge? As an extra-credit assignment, W encourages his students to chart a soundwalk of their own, designing it around a particular theme with multiple audible points of interest.  The result is a narrated journey, as he puts it, addressing "the sonic aspects (be they aesthetic, cultural, historical, functional, etc.) " of a place.  "The world is a museum.  You are the docent."
16. Take a Scent Walk.  Victoria Henshaw, a British scholar, urban planner, and author of the 2013 book Urban Smellscapes, devoted her career to the subject.  her practice include organizing smellwalks in Sheffield England.Artists Kate McLean and Sissel Tolaas amassed a smell archive stored in thousands of airtight jars, and has conducted more than fifty city smellscape projects in London, Istanbul, Tokyo, Calcutta, Auckland, and elsewhere.  She has a handy PDF at  https://sensorymaps.com/about/
17. Detect Imaginary Clues.  From Lynda Barry in Paris Review.  Take a bus to a bar.  Get buzzed.  Head homeward on foot.  Before you start your trek, think of a question, big or samll you'd like answered.  Tell yourself that you will encounter three clues to the answer to this question in the next 90 minutes.  Tell yourself on e will be in the form of a person, one will be in the oform of trash or something laying on the ground, and one will be something located above eye level."  Get home and write about how it answer your question.  
18. Record 10 Metaphor-free observations about the actual world this week.  Poet Marie Howe asks her students to write down "ten observation s fo the actual world" every week.  What she has in mind sounds fairly simple.  "Just tell me what you saw this morning, like in two lines.  'I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth, and the light came through it in three plceas,'" she explained during an interview on the public radio show On Being.  "No metaphor. It's very hard."  "To resist metaphor is very difficult, because yo have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason." Howe tells her students: no abstractions or interpretations.  After a a few weeks, they get it.  "it is so thrilling. Everyone can feel it.  Everyone is just like , "wowo."  The slice of apple, and then that gleam of the knife, and the sound of the trash can closing, and the maple tree outside, and the blue jay. I mean, it almost comes clanking into the room."  .  The students have finally worked around their need to interpret and have simply foudn a way to engage ith the world as it is, through their senses -- "just noticing what's around them," without comparison, without reference point of metaphorical shortcut.
19. Annotate the world.  The Wadsworth house, built in 1726 and now used for administrative offices, is one of the oldest buildings on Harvard U's campus.  In the past it served as the home to a number of university presidents, whose namese were later listed on a block gray monument just outside.  In 2015, someone added a pink sheet of paper to that monument, serving as a real-world annotation.  It read: "This house was alos a place of enslavement.   Among those held in bondage in the s building were: Titus, Venus, Juba, Bilhah."  ... slaves owned by a couple of the Harvard presidents listed on the monument.  This was the work of the "Harvard and Slavery" project, spun out  of a seminar at the school dedicated to exploring the neglected subject of slavery's role in the school's legacy.  Whether as a form of protest or education or both, the real-world annotation offers a new filter for the world.  What landmark or monument do you already know that tells a story of itself-- but not the WHOLE story?  What would you add for others to learn?  And as you encounter new landmarks and monuments, what questions can you ask to find out more that might currently be hidden, or at least left out?
    
20. Make a One-Minute Video About a Place.  Paola Antonelli, the senior curator, department of architecture and design, at New York's Museum o fModern Art, in her visionary 2011 show Talk to Me included a project called "myblocknyc," which encouraged individuals to create one-minute videos about their block and compile these on an interactive map, making it possible to explore the city through the sensibilities of locals.  Edit the video down to a single minute that depicts a place and the things defining it.
21. Create a Field Guide.  How about a Field Guide to Area Dogs, based on your observations? Determine names, physical descriptions, relative friendliness, and barking styles.  Or research a Field Guide to Intriguing Personal Objects Spotted in Cubicles on the fourth Floor? 
22. Seek Out Strangers.  Radio Producer Aaron Henkin took a very structured approach to engaging with strangers.  His goal: "to meet and interview everybody who lived and worked on one cty block in Baltimore." The result was an audio documentary -- and a lot of lessons learned from talking to people he didn't know.
23. Do a StoryCorps Interview.  They have published hundreds of questions.  Here are some: who has been the most important person in your life? Can you tell me about him or her?  What was the happiest moment of your life? The saddest? Who has been the biggest influence on your life? What lessons did that person teach you? Who has been the kindest to you in your life? What are the he most important lessons you've learned in life? What is your favorite memory of me? Are there any funny stories your family tells about you that come to mind? What are you proudest of? When in life have you felt most alone?  
24. Or interview an elder.   As about a job your interviewee had early on, what they liked or didn't like about school, or the first time they left home, or the biggest risk they ever took, or even what technologies made a  difference or an impression.  What do they wish someone would ask?
25. Ask Five Questions. Give Five Compliments. In the course of a week, try to ask five questions and dole out five compliments.  The questions don't need to be grandiose or existential, just honest expressions of curiosity.  You'll find that this requires an alert attentiveness toward other people and what they're saying.
26. Walk Together Silently. Lead groups on hour-long nature walks with no talking.  "Only at the end of the hike do they discuss what they experienced, with the idea being that silence allows our senses to take over, so we can smell, see, and hear more accurately.  This exercise is designed to keep your mind alert to what is really around you in the moment.  
27. Exhaust a Place.  George Perec boldest effort to try to pay the infra-ordinary its due attention took the form of a slender, lovely book called An Attempt at Exhausting  aPlace in Paris, published in 1975.  To write it, he planted himself for the better part of three days on a particular Parisian plaza -- disregarding the spectacular architecture and instead noting everything that came into his field of vision.  his list -- a postal van, a child with a dog, a woman with a newspaper, a man with a large A on his sweater -- became poetry of the everyday.  (For book Everything We Touch, Paula Zuccotti asked subjects to document every object they touched during a 24-hour period.)
28. Make an Immaterial Inventory.  Artist Brian Rea made a list of things he was worried about.  He created a huge handwritten mural of fears for a group art show.  30-foot wide, 15-foot tall.  Here's  Fast Company article about it.
29. Make an Insanely Detailed Inventory.  Read about Matt Manhattan and others and make a detailed inventory.
30. Make a Personal Map. The organizers of a project called "Where You Are" asked sixteen writers and artists to make maps...  Denis Wood hand-drew a map as memoir (titled "The Paper Route Empire") to capture Cleveland as it exists in his chidhood memories.
31. Treasure the Dregs. Rick Prelinger, film maker of No More Road Trips suggests we should "film the gas stations" when we make road trip movies... because they reveal the most interesting things in the future.  

Quotations

Pay attention.  Be astonished.  Tell about it.  - Mary Oliver

Our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. - William James

“Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.”
—John Cage

Saul Bellow calls it "first-class noticer"

curiosity is "joyous exploration".. Todd Kashdan, psych prof at George Mason University.  "the recognition and desire to seek out new knowledge and information, and the subsequent joy of learning and growing."

"A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention"  economist Herb Simon, 1971 

allokataplixis - the "heightened and delighted attention to the ordinary, which manifests in someone new to a place." (ecologist Liam Heneghan)

Sister Corita Kent's "instant finder" - an empty 35mm slide holder.

Milton Glaser - "The great benefit of drawing... is that when you look at something, you see it for the first time.  And you can spend your life without ever seeing anything."

"sketch noting" is what Austin Kleon did when attending lectures.

Marc Weidenbaum.  "The world is a museum.  You are the docent."

 "Our life experiences will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default." Williams James

St. Benedict's rule (link)

How should we take account of, questin, describe what happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual? - Georges Perec

Between stimulus and response there is a space.  In that space is our power to choose our response. - Viktor Frankl (what is there in this space?)

References to Books and People

Marina Abramovic... Abramovic method

Paola Antonelli, the senior curator, department of architecture and design, at New York's Museum of Modern Art

Amanda Tiller. Genograms.  "Everything That I Know" is a written documentation of exactly what the title suggests, all from memory, in an ongoing series of books.

Dan Ariel. Predictably Irrational 

James Benning.  Draw it With Your Eyes Closed. (class called "Looking and Listening" at the California Institute of the Arts) 

John Berger Ways of Seeing (book/documentary)

Hamish Fulton.  British artist who created an itinerary of very dry bare-bones entries -- anti-travelogue; here's his Tate Gallery exhibition

Joshua Glenn and Carol Hayes Taking Things Seriously - authors and designers write short essays about an unusal object of personal significance to them, but whuld not be obviously significant to anyone else

Lewis Hyde Trickster Makes the World

Alexandra Horowitz On Looking (walking around her neighborhood with a series of experts)

Sister Corita Kent Learning by Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit

Jason Kottke 23 Ninja tips for your next photo walk

Matt Green.  I'm Just Walkin' project... sets out to walk every single street in NYC

George Nelson How to See

Rob Forbes See for Yourself (founder of Design Within Reach)

Douglas Rushkoff Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now  and podcast Team Human

Amy Siskind.  theweeklylist.org

John Smith The Girl Chewing Gum (narrated short movie)

William  Helmreich also walked every block of NY - wrote a book The New York Nobody Knows

Nicola Twilley Gastropod podcast

Lawrence Weschler Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees

Denis Wood Rethinking the Power of Maps