Laura Cull: A(n Interrupted) Lecture on Attention in 9 Parts | Sunday 13 April | 3pm

About

The annual WHAT festival is a platform for invited artist curators to ask questions of dance, and through dance. This year, the festival re-imagines itself through a public residency and guest lectures. Four public talks on Friday, Saturday and Sunday will look at the thinking body through different lenses: language, writing, philosophy, geography, education and performance. Together, the talks develop a body of thought about how attention operates, how we direct ourselves and our thinking to ways of being full-blooded human. The four guest speakers of the what_now festival: Derek McCormack, Caroline Bergvall, Joris Vlieghe and Laura Cull. A(n Interrupted) Lecture on Attention in 9 Parts Well, what nature does from time to time, by distraction, for certain privileged individuals, could not philosophy on such a matter attempt, in another sense and another way, for everyone? Would not the role of philosophy under such circumstances be to lead us to a completer [sic] perception of reality by means of a certain displacement of our attention? It would be a question of turning this attention aside from the part of the universe which interests us from a practical viewpoint and turning it back toward what serves no practical purpose. This conversion of the attention would be philosophy itself." (Henri Bergson)