Is attention just a selective form of intention? The lecture took the concepts of focus and attention, and placed them under closer scrutiny. It examined them as essential means in the practice of lighting design.
The dictionary definitions of ‘focus’ are very much related to intention, concentration, and convergence, aiming for qualities like clarity, sharpness, and visibility. The word ‘focus’ is both a noun and a verb of directed intention and is often defined as one’s concentration of attention. What does it mean, then, to work with attention? And what is attention?
One answer to these questions is the common metaphor equating attention to a spotlight which brings to light that which is waiting in the dark. On the stage, a spotlight is not a mere metaphor. A beam of light is a practical means of directing attention and of offering the spectators’ gaze a focus which was already preselected for it.
Another approach rejects the metaphor. It approaches the concept of attention in the reverse direction, and questions both the intentionality and the subjectivity as inherent or determining qualities of it. Philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels has related attention to an old term of ‘pathos’. Considered as a pathic event, attention is not directed towards something, but rather is an event which happens to us and attacks us. It does not follow causal or chronological logic but the logic of something ‘coming to our attention’. That ‘something’ does not wait to be pointed out. It comes towards us.
The question then is what the form of a pathic spotlight could be, and how one can handle this kind of unpredictable encounter. The lecture showed extracts from performative experiments exploring the ways of exposure to the indistinct. The ultimate question was how one could focus lighting design in the reverse direction.
Nanni Vapaavuori works with light and space, their circumstances, and accompanying relationships, and in direct hands-on collaboration with the tactile material/ity of the light. In her research, she asks the question of what forms lighting design can assume if the visual is not in the focus as its primary register. Additional questions are how the characteristics of seeing are altered when it is based on touch, and in what terms and in what measures light should then be considered. As a lighting designer, Nanni has worked with installations and in the wide field of performing arts, particularly in contemporary dance both in Finland and abroad. Her work is built on a spatial basis. In addition to works for the stage, she has brought different forms of dance and theatre performances to museums and galleries. She graduated in Interior Architecture and received her Master of Arts in Lighting Design at Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts, Helsinki. Currently she is a PhD candidate at the Performing Arts Research Centre, at the University of the Arts, Helsinki.
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The burning videos by Lynda Gaudreau / 2021.