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Jenny Odell Headshot

Jenny Odell: Technologies of Seeing

Thu Dec 03, 2020 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Online

*Please register for the event by using the following link: https://berkeley.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_tm-jzjTHQxeipkviNzedYA

Berkeley alumna, bestselling author, and acclaimed speaker Jenny Odell @jennitaur returns to her alma mater with a lecture about attention based on her book, How To Do Nothing. The book is one of President Obama's favorite books of 2019, and "a complex, smart and ambitious book that at first reads like a self-help manual, then blossoms into a wide-ranging political manifesto (NYT)". 

She learned much about attention from Birdwatching, "to observe birds not just as instances but as actors is bird-watching in time, whether I’m observing moment-to-moment decisions or changes across the seasons (Odell)". Her technologies of seeing don't involve machines as much as they involve a certain know-how of being in the world, of dissolving into pure observation.

Jenny Odell’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, The Believer, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, SFMOMA's Open Space, The Creative Independent, and Sierra Magazine. My NYT bestselling book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, was published by Melville House in 2019. In addition to her text work, Jenny Odell is an accomplished new media artist, who created murals for Google Data Centers. Her quixotic, astute and carefully researched works appear at SFMOMA, the Museum of Capitalism and the Internet Archive. Her work generally involves acts of close observation, whether it's birdwatching, collecting screen shots, or trying to parse bizarre forms of e-commerce. In one of my favorite projects, I created The Bureau of Suspended Objects, a searchable online archive of 200 objects salvaged from the San Francisco dump, each with photographs and painstaking research into its material, corporate, and manufacturing histories.

For the most up to date information, visit artsdesign.berkeley.edu.