PAYING ATTENTION

The idea was simple: What does the young Exploratorium staffer notice commuting through San Francisco each day? As we walk, bike, or ride to work, what images create intrigue, trigger dreams, or raise questions about the visible world until it yields some secrets, if only momentarily?

These questions began our collaboration and led to this installation. To pay attention fully and deeply is to slow down and use all of our senses to peer at the world's details. To consciously and intentionally notice is to listen closely to our eyes while sorting through the visual clutter of the urban environment.

I invited six young Museum staffers--artists, scientists, writers--to pay attention to the city routes they travel and create scripts based on the landscapes they observed and responded to daily. Each participant fashioned a portrait unique to their own interests and perspectives. In July 2003, we filmed in their neighborhoods, like the Mission, the Richmond, the Tenderloin, and out by Ocean Beach; along their routes, from the Embarcadero through North Beach and from the Marina to the Palace of Fine Arts; and at spots with personal meaning--places which may evoke visual memories throughout their lives.

I also asked participants to write imagined letters to themselves, "one from when you were age 8 to yourself now, and one from when you are age 80 to yourself now." What can memory echo from childhood--or from old age, when we become "time travelers"--as we move through the very real and completely embodied urban landscape? What do we imagine we are paying attention to?

The final work is the result of these inquiries into how we see and remember. As a collaboration, it shares multiple energies: The Exploratorium inspired me to design it while supporting its production; I worked with the participants to help them express what was in their minds' eyes; and, in turn, they trusted me to develop their scripts into the mosaic-like media work called "Paying Attention."