Art of Attention: Body-Mind Awareness and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century (book)

FAIN: FT-291702-23

Kate Mondloch
University of Oregon (Eugene, OR 97403-5219)

Research and writing leading to a book about mind-body awareness in contemporary art, with a focus on immersive art experiences, museum programming, and visual art pedagogy in the 21st century.

My summer stipend project explores the widespread promotion of mindful, body-based attention initiatives through an analysis of body-mind awareness in contemporary art. The long-term outcome will be my book, “Art of Attention: Body-Mind Awareness and Contemporary Art,” aimed toward a wide audience of scholars and practitioners of art, museum studies, and the public humanities. The project uses a theoretical framework informed by recent writing on new media, perception, and embodied cognition to assess the various modes of mind-body awareness promoted by immersive art experiences, museum programming, and visual art pedagogy in the 21st century. Through detailed case studies, I investigate the diverse social, institutional, and technological issues at stake and analyze their significance for theorizing attention and spectatorship in our digital era. I will complete Ch.2, “Selfie Power: The Performance of Participation and the Attention-Experience Economy,” during the stipend period.