Attention

<p>Attention is fast becoming a rare commodity, more valuable than money. Today’s attention merchants compete to acquire attention which can then be translated into financial capital as well as political capital. New technologies from personal computing devices to eye tracking technologies enabling the measurement, recording, analysis and control of human attention. As a result, we live in an increasing state of distraction as corporations, institutions, friends, and colleague vie for attention. In this state, the control of one’s own attentive capacities becomes one of the most political issues of contemporary subjectivity. This Inaugural issue of <em>Attention</em> addresses this issue as the founding theme of the journal. In an increasingly visually distracted world, <em>Attention</em>, will create a space based on the power of the spoken word, conversation, dialogue and debate to focus our attention. Rather than the drip feed of fragmented soundbites, <em>Attention</em> takes the traditional print journal as its model and curates in each issue a coherent collection of audio pieces that deepen our understanding of a single theme. Audio as a medium that simultaneously opens up architectural discourse and debate to new modes of debate that emerge from the realm of sound; from in-situ building reviews, listening experiments, soundscapes, explorations of acoustics, to new forms of dialogical montage that weave together virtual symposia of voices across distances of time and space.</p>