The Asymmetry International Symposium 2026: Ecologies of Attention: Sensing at the Edge

Why It Matters

Reframing attention from an economic resource to an ecological, political and sensory field has direct implications for cultural institutions, digital governance and research agendas seeking to mitigate attention extraction and promote more equitable, collective modes of perception. This shift could influence funding, curation, policy and technology design aimed at countering cognitive capitalism and fostering sensory sovereignty.

Summary

The Asymmetry International Symposium 2026, co-hosted by Asymmetry and the Cotto Institute, convened researchers, curators and artists to interrogate “Ecologies of Attention: Sensing at the Edge.” Organizers Michelle Landov and postdoctoral fellow Li Jung framed attention not as a scarce commodity but as a relational, embodied ecology shaped by digital media, historical power structures and changing cognitive modalities. Presentations traced how attention has been commodified and extracted under cognitive capitalism and called for practices that support sensory sovereignty, more-than-human knowing, and slower forms of collective listening. The event positioned contemporary art and interdisciplinary research as critical sites for developing alternative attentional ecologies and methods of inquiry.

Original Description

How do we attend to the world, and how are the terms of that attention already shaped for us? Bringing together artists, curators, film theorists, and art historians, Ecologies of Attention: Sensing at the Edge reflects on attention as both a cognitive faculty or a scarce resource, and an aesthetic, embodied, and ecological condition. With a particular attentiveness to voices shaped across and in relation to the Asia Pacific, the symposium considers how perception is formed through social, technical, and sensorial environments, and how art might open other ways of noticing and sensing.

If attention is so often described in the language of crisis – fragmented, captured, exhausted – this programme lingers with its textures and atmospheres. It asks what becomes possible when we move away from an understanding of attention governed by extraction, productivity, and competition, toward what Yves Citton has called an ‘ecology of attention’. A way of thinking that situates perception as diffused and inseparable from the worlds that compose it.

This symposium gathers practices that remain close to the unstable edges of perception – between visibility and opacity, signal and sensation, intuition and analysis, the human and the more-than-human. It invites forms of aesthetic practice that dwell within mediation while also straining against its limits. These practices register ecological entanglement, embodied knowledge, cosmological thought, and the shifting conditions through which images, environments, and narratives come to be felt.

What kinds of receptivity might be cultivated within a culture of distraction? What forms of attunement and sensory relation emerge when perception is approached as exposure and as something shaped with and by others? How might moving image, performance, and curatorial practice reorient the sensible, making space for quieter forms of encounter and for ways of sensing that exceed the immediately knowable?

Across presentations, discussions, performance, and screenings, Ecologies of Attention invites attention to be thought otherwise: shifting away from a mode of capture towards a practice of relation.

Speakers and artists list includes: Dr Kiki Tianqi Yu, Chantel Foo, Yin Aiwen, Serafina Min, Jiayi Chen (remote), Yin-Ju Chen (remote), Stella Zhong, Solveig Qu Suess, and Dr Royce Ng (of Zheng Mahler).

Convened by Dr Wenny Teo, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Asian Art at the Courtauld Institute; Michèle Ruo Yi Landolt, Director at Asymmetry; Dr Yayu Zheng, Asymmetry Postdoctoral Fellow at the Courtauld Institute; and Jessica Kwok, Head of Programmes and Curatorial at Asymmetry.

Full programme: https://courtauld.ac.uk/whats-on/ecologies-of-attention/