Cadences, Attentional Moves in the Arts and Everyday Life

The arts and artistic practices create specific modes and mediations that involve variations in attention. They are ‘tuning the attention’, if we are to use Lisa Nelson’s formulation in Tuning Scores (2003), which generate cadences, movements and intensities between different types of focus, more or less fluctuating, of more or less disinterested or distracted attention. Attention is always in movement, and according to Paul Ricoeur, it is always more or less at the service of a desire, an intention, a task, a need or a volition.

The study of variations in attention in the arts, including performance and cinema, is also linked to how we see the world and choose what we want to show. Sensitivity is refined to give visibility to something that was confused with the landscape, highlighting it or co-composing with it.

When we choose a cutout, a framework for what we are going to share, we create a surplus—everything we choose not to show—and a margin—which is within the cutout of what is shown but is not reinforced as ‘the most relevant’.

These choices also reveal some common ground between art and politics—the choice between what is considered relevant to see and make visible and what is left out of attention with its consequent implications.

What we do not see (or hear or smell) of the figure/background, context and focus, movement, drag, or blur is very broad and requires a great deal of ‘attention training’ in order to play, describe, and live in the arts, sciences, and ordinary everyday life.

On the other hand, the word ‘cadences’ has a procedural and dynamic dimension that relates not only to modulations and rhythms but also to falls. ‘Cadere’, the word behind ‘cadence’, contains the idea of falling. 

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