Among the bustling crowds in some Renaissance paintings, peripheral figures point their index finger toward the scene’s pulsating heart, as if to intercept and guide our wayward gaze. First drawn in the margins of manuscripts and then adopted as a typographic convention, a small hand with an outstretched index finger (a manicule or digit) came to serve as a kind of annotation to signal a text’s key passages to hurried or distracted readers. Then, increasingly an instruction, this hand became pure signage: an arrow, blinking light and advertizing injunction. The little hand became legion, calling attention to a myriad of signals emitted by the press, radio, photography, movies and television.

Long before our media environment evolved into a digital cosmos, Walter Benjamin noted the generalization of “reception in distraction,” indicating “major perceptual shifts.” On the Web, we still have the icon of a little hand, now wearing a white glove, to highlight hovering hyperlinks that can be activated by a click, while our fingers on a touchscreen make searches that may turn out to be inspired or dead-ends. Multiple ruts, whether captive or emancipated, mark the pathways along which we move, driven by self-interest, curiosity, astonishment and associative delirium.

In the spirit of an “ecology of attention” defined by Yves Citton in 2014, the exhibition des attentions asks itself: “What do we let traverse us?” in our digital environment? The ten artists brought together for this show express a fluctuating, wandering attention, freed of both technological determinism and monetizable standardization. Instead of a permanent state of alert demanding instantaneous receptivity and proactivity, they sketch out a furtive, variable vigilance, simultaneously dreamy and rebellious, deaf to siren songs but attentive to context, the people around us and our environment. Far from the performance imperatives dictated by the logic of quantification, their work embraces an “emancipating distraction,” a floating attention that can focus by itself.

Brice Domingues, Catherine Guiral, Hélène Meisel