jenny odell how to do nothing resisting the attention economy

Much of her art exists within and pulls from the Internet this is no exception. Odell conducted in-depth research into the manufacturing, distribution, popularity, and use of each object. The residency culminated in an exhibition of her work: The Bureau of Suspended Objects, a detailed archive of objects scavenged and selected at the dump. In 2015, Odell was artist-in-residence at Recology SF, otherwise known as the San Francisco dump. Jenny Odell's desk during her residency at Recology SF I often say that medium is context Part of the reason I work this way is because I find existing things infinitely more interesting than anything I could possibly make. Odell has described where this approach comes from, Many of her artistic projects re-use existing objects or images and put them in context, for example images from Google Earth and Google Maps. Odell's work consists of acts of close observations such as bird watching, collecting screenshots, or trying to parse bizarre forms of e-commerce. She graduated from UC Berkeley in 2008 with a degree in English Literature and received her MFA in Design + Technology from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010. Odell was born in San Francisco and grew up in Cupertino, California. She wrote The New York Times best-selling book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019). She taught Internet art and digital/physical design at Stanford University from 2013 to 2021. In this conversation, Jenny and I discuss the difference between productivity and creativity, how artists orchestrate attention, the ideologies we use to value our time, what it means to do nothing, restoring context to our lives and words, why “groundedness requires actual ground,” lucid dreaming, the joys of bird watching, my difficulty appreciating conceptual art, her difficulty with meditation, and much more.Jenny Odell (born 1986) is an American multidisciplinary artist, writer, and educator based in Oakland, California. And she’s a visual artist who has taught digital and physical design at Stanford since 2013, as well as done residencies at Facebook, San Francisco Recology, and the Internet Archive.Īll of which is to say she’s the perfect person to talk to about creativity and attention in a world designed to flatten both. Odell is the author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. “And yet a certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought, lingers.” “For some, there may be a kind of engineer’s satisfaction in the streamlining and networking of our entire lived experience,” writes Jenny Odell.

Jenny odell how to do nothing resisting the attention economy