Pay Attention! explores how the competition for our focus—and the technologies designed to capture it—reshape contemporary aesthetics and everyday experience. In a world where digital platforms commodify attention, it becomes both a valuable resource and a form of labor: something to be seized, manipulated, and sold. As we spend more of our lives in digital spaces, platforms and devices influence not only what we consume, but how we see, remember, interact, and present ourselves. Our identities and perceptions become filtered through aesthetic forms engineered for speed, visibility, and impact—hyperkinetic editing, notification alerts, and content designed to be consumed in seconds.

From algorithmically curated feeds to the sensory overstimulation of urban advertisements, the culture around us is optimized for interruption and instant engagement. A feedback loop emerges: algorithms amplify whatever draws attention, creators adapt their work to meet those demands, and these forms are reinforced and repeated until they define what feels familiar or possible. We learn to scan rather than gaze, to seek the dopamine hit of the unexpected rather than dwell in uncertainty, to perform through platform-specific visual languages that promise visibility but often deliver anxiety. In this environment, every creative output risks being flattened into content, while slowness, contemplation, and complexity are pushed to the margins.

The exhibition invites viewers to recognize their own embeddedness within these systems—perhaps while checking notifications even as they read this text—and to consider how we might reclaim agency through resistance, reorientation, or the radical act of choosing where to direct our attention in an age engineered for distraction.

Concept

Special thanks to:

Bezirksvertretung Alsergrund for sponsoring the event

WEST for providing the exhibition space