The state of attentiveness in this nanosecond world

In the early decades of the last century, eccentric painter Mark Tobey would often be seen walking the streets of Seattle -- very, very slowly. What for most people was a 10-minute walk took him two hours. His gaze was everywhere, noticing things others ignored. Those who walked with him said it completely altered their attitude toward their surroundings.

The arts have always been about directing attention to places it might not otherwise go. And paying attention has conventionally meant an alert, studious, single-minded concentration. But suddenly, things seem to be changing. The rapid pace of modern life, the compulsion to multitask, the weapons of mass distraction that global corporations and the media have unleashed make us different readers, viewers, listeners. Attention spans among the young keep getting shorter. In my neighborhood, distracted drivers, with cell phone in one hand, grande latte in the other, keep crashing their SUVs. Is this crisis or opportunity? Should we put on the brakes and smell the coffee? Or will we, by mastering the multiplicities and new technologies of the modern world, expand our potentials as human beings?

Such were the kinds of questions posed over the weekend at Pomona College, which hosted a colloquium on attention and the arts titled “See Here.” On hand were light artist James Turrell, composer Pauline Oliveros, hyper-text author Michael Joyce, art historian Norman Bryston, new-media artist Lev Manovich and Tibetan Buddhist practitioner Abbe Blum. Video artist Bill Viola got snowed-in in Colorado.

Turrell and Oliveros have spent their long careers examining the profound implications of intense attention. Turrell does it by making light inhabit a space so fully that it changes our perception of our surroundings, especially the sky. Oliveros accomplishes something similar through what she calls deep listening, where she invites members of her audience to get inside a sound and let it resonate through their bodies until they can no longer separate themselves from the surroundings.

What these two shamanistic artists do is revolutionary. No one has ever used light quite the way Turrell does; no one has ever used sound as Oliveros does. But they are also traditional in that their work involves a meditative slowness and quietness designed to awaken the senses. One spends hours gazing at the sky in a Turrell installation. “Pauline’s Solo,” a beautiful improvisational work that Oliveros performed Saturday night on her specially tuned accordion, was, at half an hour, short by her standards but still a slow, studied concentration. For those interested in the really slow and unchanging, members of the college’s music department staged a 24-hour performance of Erik Satie’s “Vexations,” a mystical piano score repeated 840 times.

Turrell and Oliveros are white-haired legends, and bright, young students flocked reverentially around them. The auditorium was packed for Turrell, who with his flowing white beard appeared positively biblical as he presented a riveting two-hour overview of his work. He described his career from his student days at Pomona College, where he found his attention in art history classes drawn more to the light beam of the slide projector than the screen, to his ongoing project of transforming Roden Crater in Arizona into a grandiose art installation.

Students listened with respectful attention to this great art prophet. But for another member of the audience, Russian artist Manovich, the presentation was an opportunity to answer e-mail, the glow of his laptop competing with Turrell’s luminous slides. For him, it is a matter of pride that the mind can absorb more than one thing at a time; he even boasts of attending to e-mail while leading graduate seminars.

For Manovich, the aspects of the modern world that contemplative artists attempt to escape -- sense-assaulting supermarkets, TV, Web graphics, Las Vegas -- are visually thrilling and richly stimulating environments, more so than museums. “Artists,” he insisted, “can’t compete.” When asked by Blum, the Buddhist, whether he would like to be operated on by a surgeon continually checking his e-mail, Manovich countered that he would certainly want a surgeon who was able to process information from various sources at once.

Ultimately, the issue is unresolvable. We tend to narrow and widen attention as needed. In a gripping, poetic reading, “I Walk Mornings,” Joyce spoke of how this exercise in wakefulness can also be a way of tuning out -- a retreat from technology. His walks may be indeterminate, but they have made him less enamored of rambling hypertext fiction, in which a reader becomes a walker following a personal path of Web links.

“Choosing not to choose,” Joyce observed, is the critical issue in the Information Age, and it is the one the older artists seemed most concerned with. Both Joyce and Turrell spoke of having become addicted to e-mail; they had to give it up to get anything done. “It was harder quitting e-mail than quitting smoking,” Joyce claimed.

“Down with quietness; down with slowness,” trumpeted Bryston, a feisty British art historian, in his talk about Los Angeles artist Sharon Lockhart, who makes slow but disquieting films that manage microlevels of attention. Bryston was concerned with attention as a changeable phenomenon, observing the intricate reactions of our continually fluid attention as we watch a Lockhart film that itself may show a fidgeting audience.

As an example of just how short attention spans have become, Joyce pointed out that the average time computer users spend on a Web page is a shocking two seconds. But in “Attention in Music” on Friday night, cellist Tom Flaherty and pianist Genevieve Lee gave an engrossing performance of Webern’s three short Opus 11 pieces. Each is less than a minute, and in each, two seconds is a significant time span in which considerable expression can take place.

These pieces were written in 1914 by a composer -- controversial and incomprehensible in his day -- who eventually turned out to have a powerful effect on abstract 20th century music, although in radically complex ways he couldn’t have predicted and wouldn’t have approved of.

And that perhaps was the colloquium’s most important message for us now: How we pay attention cannot be pinned down.

For instance, we can only expect the world to offer ever more stimuli. What then do we pay attention to? At what point do we overload? And is that a bad thing?

Even suspension of attention is a kind of attentiveness, Joyce pointed out. It allows something else to enter our consciousness.