Birds, Parking Lots, and Radical Refusal of the Attention Economy1 min read

Elia Vargas

Jenny Odell looks at birds along her street and at parking lots on the internet. She is a new media artist and a writer whose work involves practices of close observation. “I didn’t take the photographs of the parking lots, I didn’t make the parking lots, but I found them and I put them in some kind of configuration that might jolt someone out of their familiarity with it.” Odell’s work reframes the infrastructure of the Internet and tries to draw attention to place. In 2018 she wrote How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. In 2015 she created the one-person organization, The Bureau of Suspended Objects, a media archeology of junk at the San Francisco Dump. Her forthcoming book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock will be released in March 2023.

In episode 5 of the Signals podcast, Elia Vargas talks with Jenny Odell about her NY Times bestselling book, a childish (in a good way) excitement of mining the internet, and the importance of place and embodiment in contemporary digital culture. Like Odell’s practice, the conversation is playful, broad, and tackles critical questions of digital attention, radical refusal, and being grounded in the world.

from Odell’s Bureau of Suspended Objects exhibition

Podcast Music Credits: systemritual (Elia Vargas and Nathan Blaz)

Image Credits: Jenny Odell

Dr. Elia Vargas is an artist and scholar working across multiple mediums, ranging from video and sound to writing and performance. His work is critical, speculative, ecological, energetic, and technocultural. It is engaged in an interdisciplinary approach with contemporary and historical experimental media, digital cultural, and feminist science studies. Vargas collaborates widely with artists, musicians, and institutions. He holds a PhD from UC Santa Cruz. He is currently a lecturer at CSU Monterey Bay and is co-founder of the SF Bay Area art and technology organization, the Living Room Light Exchange.