The Art of Noticing

“Pay attention,” Susan Sontag once advised a young audience; she was speaking of the creative process, but also of living. “It’s all about paying attention. It’s all about taking in as much of what’s out there as you can, and not letting the excuses and the dreariness of some of the obligations you’ll soon be incurring narrow your lives. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.” To stay eager, to connect, to find interest in the everyday, to notice what everybody else overlooks—these are vital skills and noble goals. They speak to the difference between looking and seeing, between hearing and listening, between accepting what the world presents and noticing what matters to you.

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The one thing more than anything else, is learning to pay attention. —ROBERT IRWIN

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Paying attention, making a habit of noticing, helps cultivate an original perspective, a distinct point of view. That’s part of what I try to teach my students, and it’s part of what I try to practice myself.

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The stimulation of modern life, philosopher Georg Simmel complained in 1903, wears down the senses, leaving us dull, indifferent, and unable to focus on what really matters. In the 1950s, writer William Whyte lamented in Life magazine that “billboards, neon signs,” and obnoxious advertising were converting the American landscape into one long roadside distraction. “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention,” economist Herb Simon warned in 1971.

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But being busy is overrated. Darwin worked only a couple of hours a day and spent a lot of time taking long walks. No matter what line of work you’re in or what kind of life you lead, you will know how easy it is to spend a day getting stuff done…without doing anything meaningful at all. A hypereffective schedule designed to maximize productivity is, in fact, more likely to distract you from what’s important than help you discover it. Imagine, instead, devoting

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When you actively notice new things, that puts you in the present…As you’re noticing new things, it’s engaging, and it turns out…it’s literally, not just figuratively, enlivening. —ELLEN J. LANGER

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Sometimes it’s about finding a pocket of stillness, and sometimes it’s about willful activity in the most unlikely circumstances. Sometimes it means blocking all distraction, and sometimes it means choosing the distractions you want the most. It’s about being in a moment or escaping one. Every day is filled with opportunities to be amazed, surprised, enthralled—to experience the enchanting everyday. To stay eager. To be, in a word, alive.

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I didn’t know it at the time, but I was creating a mental search image. That’s a term I’m borrowing from the writer and psychology professor Alexandra Horowitz, who in turn credits it to a noted bird watcher, Luuk Tinbergen. Tinbergen noticed that songbirds tend to seek out a specific species of beetle (or whatever) that they evidently prefer to devour over other edible insects. Having a predetermined search image helps them spot their prey

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Creating a mental search image, Horowitz explains, is how “we find our car keys, spot our friends in a crowd, and even find patterns that we had never seen before.” In her useful and fun book On Looking, she writes: “Everyone needs a mechanism to select what, out of all the things in the world, they should both look for and at, and what they should ignore.” That’s a search image—“the visual form of the expectation that allows you to find meaning in chaos.” In San Francisco, security

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The trick is to choose something that’s ubiquitous and taken for granted. I’ve studied pay phones (where are they clustered, where are they rare, how many are broken?) and standpipes (which ones have been modified to prevent their use as de facto stools?) and neighborhood watch signs (which neighborhoods have them and which don’t?). I’ve looked in big cities and small communities, at home and on the road.

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Paying attention is the only thing that guarantees insight. It is the only real weapon we have against power, too. You can’t fight things you can’t actually see. —MICHELLE DEAN

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(Ecologist Liam Heneghan has given this “heightened and delighted attention to the ordinary, which manifests in someone new to a place,” a name: allokataplixis, combining the Greek allo, meaning “other,” and katapliktiko, meaning “wonder.”)

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One of my students pledged to “notice something new” every day on the two-block walk she made to and from our classroom studios. You can do the same from a bike, car, bus, or train. No tech tools are required.

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AS PART OF A CLASS about color, artist Munro Galloway assigned students a one-hour walk. “Let color be your guide,” he instructed. “Allow yourself to be sensitized to the color in your surroundings.” Think about these questions from Galloway’s description of the exercise in Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: • What are the colors that you become aware of first? • What are the colors that reveal themselves more slowly? • What colors do you observe that you did not expect? • What color relationships do you notice? • Do colors appear to change over time?

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1977, furniture designer George Nelson published a book boldly titled How to See, an expansion of an earlier pamphlet written for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Twenty-five years later, Design Within Reach founder Rob Forbes oversaw an improved republication of the volume. It’s mostly a collection of pictures taken by Nelson, who observed that the work might have more honestly been titled How I See. In a new introduction Forbes called it “a book about the discipline of recording and assessing visual information.”

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Nelson was a collector, and he excelled at dreaming up interesting search images to hunt and document: arrows, public clocks, manhole covers, street corners, geometric shapes, specific architectural details, signs and objects prohibiting specific behaviors, ephemeral traces such as footprints—human, animal, or even (if you include tire treads) mechanical.

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My favorite of Forbes’s image series documents the surprising visual and physical diversity of bike locks in Amsterdam—“studies in materials and textures and colors as much as function,” he writes. “It’s about observation and thinking,” Forbes argues. “When you discover something special out there it’s like stumbling into a café or shop that was not listed in a tourist guide—your experience of the world is much richer because you did it on your own.”

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GEORGE NELSON’S best image collection may have been a set of numbers that he turned into a slide show. “Finding numbers in the urban landscape is very easy, and looking for them is a good eye-sharpening exercise,” he wrote. His slide show started with a picture of the number 100 and counted down to 0. (It took him months to collect all the images.) While traveling by foot, bike, or car, start “counting” and see how far you can get. “The hunt was more satisfying and the reward was a new awareness of something previously invisible,” Nelson observed. “The game, of course, is to find unexpected shapes, sizes, and contexts.” Look for a 1, then a 2, then a 3, and keep going; stop at the end of your current journey or carry it over to the next one and the next one, for a week, a month, a year…or the rest of your life.

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DOCUMENT THE (SEEMINGLY)…

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A DEVELOPER NAMED Jacob Harris regularly takes pictures of a blue cloudless sky—near-identical squares of blue. He calls the series “Sky Gradients.” The tight constraints of the project are the point; Harris cites the influence of Dogme 95, a filmmaking movement from the 1990s, started by Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. They created a manifesto that advocated the power of story but was notable for its…

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Harris suggests that his real motive has little to do with sparking creativity. “I don’t really consider myself much of an artist or this project as art,” he wrote in TheAtlantic.com. “I do this as a means of meditation.” While sometimes inspired by a fleeting moment of boredom, Harris claims he takes these…

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My friend (but not relation) Dave Walker has a similar pastime. He takes pictures of telephone poles around New Orleans. Close-ups—details, really. Sometimes the image shows the texture of a pole, but sometimes a pole is riddled with staples, or touched by an odd dab of paint, or marred by a bent nail. The colors vary, and subtle patterns appear. I think of Dave when I notice a telephone pole as I’m walking and study it for some quietly hidden visual appeal that he might…

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THE ARTIST Robert Irwin is surely the patron saint of noticing. As detailed in Lawrence Weschler’s book Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, Irwin’s work focuses on the experience and context of seeing, rather than on producing art objects—“…

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“I found a certain strength in sustaining over a period of time my attention on a single point,” Irwin told Weschler. “After a while, it’s like you peel back the layers of that issue and are able to get to a much deeper reasoning of how and in what way this thing makes sense.” Gradually he transitioned to making work like acrylic discs that treated light as their medium.…

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It’s possible to borrow Irwin’s practice and apply it on a more practical scale. Slow Art Day offers an example. This is an annual event held at multiple locations across the United States; participants are invited to meet at a museum, SlowArtDay.com explains, and “look at five works of art for 10 minutes each, and then meet together over lunch to talk about their experience.” You don’t have to wait for the next Slow Art Day to try this. It’s fun to spend…

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We spend so much time looking down at our phones or our feet, or even just from side to side into store windows, that it’s a good idea to remind ourselves to look up towards the tops of buildings. This is where cornucopiate garlands and angry gryphons gather below eaves and the residue of old advertising signage lingers. —ALICE TWEMLOW

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EVERY YEAR, at least one of my students hits on some variation of the idea that if you want to notice things you missed in the past, then up is a good place to explore. For starters, you can simply look up from your phone from time to time. Lift your eyes to what’s not right in front of you, but just above. The design writer Alice Twemlow,

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Design Research graduate program, points out that there’s a good reason so many people who think about attention suggest that taking a moment to look up can be powerful: “Because it’s true.” That’s a great start. But Twemlow has another thought: looking farther up. “If you look farther up—and you really have to crank your head back for this, which means slowing way down or stopping moving altogether—to the roofs themselves,” she says, “you might glimpse drying washing being whipped by the wind, a flock of pigeons homing, prisoners playing basketball in a fenced-in yard, or someone secretly sunbathing in between the jagged teeth of water towers, chimneys, and aerials.”

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“My favorite is to count chimneys,” suggests designer and writer Ingrid Fetell Lee. “Looking for chimneys raises your gaze, which seems to boost your mood (possibly because it lets more light into the eye), but it also makes you look at a completely different part of a city or a town. You become aware of the way the land meets the sky, the various ways that roofs are built, and the wildlife living up in the rafters and the treetops.”

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Find a place to sit or lie down and look up. Take your time. See what’s up there. Then look for what’s beyond that.

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LOOK OUT A WINDOW SPEND TEN MINUTES looking out the window you most persistently ignore. Find one in your office or your bedroom or wherever, the one you so take for granted that you forget it’s even there. Examine the edges of what the window makes visible. Find three things you’ve never noticed. Describe the scene in front of you. Next time you encounter a window that’s new to you, stop and look. Study the view. Tally the details. Look for movement. Think about what you can’t control. See what happens.

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ANOTHER STUDENT OF MINE, Lucy Knops, was inspired by Robert Irwin’s habit of seeing. She thought about how she framed what she saw. She made physical Polaroid-size frames, acrylic with a dry-erase surface—like portable windows. “Hold the frame up to an object or scene and write a one- to two-word description on it,” she instructed. Maybe that’s a word like beautiful or vacant or cloudy. “Then,” she continued, “shift the frame to focus on a different subject, leaving the original description.” How does the earlier description influence what you’re looking at? The idea echoes one from Sister Corita Kent, a nun and artist who in her book Learning by Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit proposed using “an instant finder,” which was an empty 35mm slide holder—a viewfinder with no camera. You can make your own by cutting a rectangular…

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LOOK REALLY, REALLY SLOWLY IN HER ART HISTORY CLASSES, Jennifer L. Roberts makes her students regard a single work for “a painfully long time.” How long, exactly? Three hours.…

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When their resistance dies down, Roberts reports, her students find that looking really, really slowly forces them to notice things they had initially passed over, sometimes changing their entire understanding of a work. The process unlocks meaning and potential that first glances can miss. This can be applied well beyond the context of contemplating works of art. Look really, really…

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LOOK REPEATEDLY IN AN ESSAY in The New York Times, culture reporter Randy Kennedy described a decade or so of going to look again and again at Caravaggio’s The Denial of St. Peter at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Over the years, his view of the work evolved. He used to think Peter was its primary focus but has come to regard another figure, the maid who has called him out (per the Gospels) as a follower of Jesus, as the work’s truly central subject. He now believes it is her “hesitation and humanity” in a moment of accusation that gives the painting its power. Kennedy shrugs off the possibility that this take, developed over so many years, might contradict historical evidence or more official art-critic interpretations. “One result of looking at a painting so long that you can see it in your mind’s eye is that it does, in a very real sense, become your own,” he writes, “not quite the same painting that anyone…

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One clever example involves the game Buy, Burn, or Steal. Participants are challenged to examine all the works in a particular gallery and decide which one they’d be willing to buy, which one they so despise that they’d like to burn it, and which one they love so much that they want to steal it. The best thing about Buy, Burn, or Steal is that you can play it anywhere, alone or with others.

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treating the museum as a backdrop has become almost a parody—see me (sort of) seeing what I’m supposed to see?—then maybe the more productive strategy is to pay attention to something else. Anything else. Next time you’re at a museum of any kind, then, devote some time to studying what is not on display. Here is your checklist: LOOK FOR FLAWS “You usually come to a museum and orient yourself towards the artworks,” artist Nina Katchadourian has observed, “and a lot of things in your literal and metaphorical peripheral vision are ruled out as things not worth looking at.” But questioning what deserves attention and what doesn’t helped guide Katchadourian to an unusual project she called “Dust Gathering,” an audio tour of the Museum of Modern Art centered entirely on the museum’s dust: where it collects, who cleans it, how it’s kept to a minimum, and so on. To create this tour, she interviewed behind-the-scenes personnel extensively—but she also got used to the idea of zeroing in on the existence of dust bunnies in the crisply pristine museum. “It’s weird to go there and feel a domestic sense of that building now,” Katchadourian later told an interviewer. “It’s brought it down to earth in a strange way for me. I always found MoMA intimidating and kind of a temple.” And of course that is part of what museums are designed to make visitors feel: The sense of reverence is a big part of the power to direct your attention. Challenge that. CONSIDER THE GUARDS What they’re wearing, their expressions, what they’re looking at. Imagine their relationship to the work on display. Don’t make assumptions, and don’t bother them. (You’d be surprised how many journalistic and photographic projects have focused on museum guards.) Just think about them. PAY ATTENTION TO THE NAMES OF DONORS In almost any museum, you will encounter various wall-panel displays thanking specific donors and patrons, as well as the names given to individual galleries and halls within the museum. Research these people. STUDY THE BEHAVIOR OF OTHER MUSEUMGOERS Photographer Stefan Drashan is an inspiration on this front. He spends quite a bit of time in museums, observing and documenting other people and, somewhat secondarily, their relationship to displayed works. One series is called “People Touching Artworks,” an activity that is almost always verboten but turns out to be fairly commonplace just the same. Another series collects images of people sleeping in museums. Yet another, “People Matching Artworks,” captures patrons in outfits that pair eerily well with the paintings they’re looking at or walking past. Start by stealing these categories. Then invent your own. LISTEN TO WHAT OTHER PATRONS SAY TO ONE ANOTHER OR WHAT THE STAFF SAYS TO THEM Musician/artist John Kannenberg once created “A Sound Map of the Art Institute of Chicago,” recording various casual snippets. “No flashes,” a guard warned patrons near American Gothic, for instance. In another gallery, he captured an exchange he…

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Think then of some regular walk or drive or ride you experience often, or even that you’re experiencing for the first time. Imagine yourself a curator. Decide what, among the things you notice, you might declare to be public works of art. Perhaps a disheveled pylon marking a street flaw that ought to have been fixed by now. Maybe a post that seems to be a lingering remnant of an otherwise departed fence. Possibly even a child with a piercing stare. Grant yourself the superpower of making “art” wherever you go, and see how that changes what you perceive. Art is everywhere, if you say so.

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DISCOVER THE BIG WITHIN THE SMALL ALEX KALMAN is the curator of an unusual museum—called Mmuseumm—on the little-trafficked one-block Cortlandt Alley in lower Manhattan. The exhibition space is six feet by six feet and used to be part of a freight elevator shaft. The objects on view are just as distinct as the room they occupy; Kalman calls them examples of the “vernacular,” but they might look, to some, like random doodads. In fact, they reflect a remarkable eye for the deeper meaning that can lurk in the overlooked. “These objects weren’t created to be appreciated as pieces of art,” Kalman said on one of my visits. And yet they reveal “our psychology, our needs, and our desires,” he insisted. “Some element of who we are.” Kalman fits a remarkable and rotating variety of items on the slender shelves that line Mmuseumm’s tight walls. He pointed out a small sign, maybe two inches square, evidently from a motel. “Dear Guest,” it read, because of the “popularity of our guest room amenities,” various items in the room are for sale: $25 for the alarm clock, $15 for a hand towel, and so on. “Should you decide to take these articles from your room instead of obtaining them from the Executive Housekeeper, we will assume you approve a corresponding charge to your account.” Translated: Steal what you want, and we will bill you for it. “This object,” explains Mmuseumm’s catalogue, “is the result of a capitalist’s handling of crime.” This sweeping sentiment can be pinned on an insignificant item because of Kalman’s remarkable ability to look and see. He openly acknowledges the influence here of his parents, designer Tibor Kalman and artist Maira Kalman. “Every household has a first language, a kind of language of the home,” he says. “And luckily for me the language of my home was looking; I was just kind of raised to look around.” This means Kalman was also raised to discover the surprising within the workaday, by way of seeing deeply. He remembers, for instance, coming home from school one day to find someone installing a collection of onion rings—the kind you’d get from a greasy spoon—with “unbelievable precision,” in the living room. His parents, evidently, had decided these objects were worth serious consideration. In short, Kalman has spent “a lifetime of looking carefully,” he said, “and seeking out the humanity and the humor and the absurdity in things.” All of which informed Kalman’s deconstruction of the motel sign: a minor, incidental object that reveals a sophisticated set of thoughts about security and the profit motive, a deterrent filtered through the language of hospitality. Kalman hopes to “remind us that we should really be very curious and look around and not take things for granted,” he said. “Find the joy in wondering about that toilet paper roll or that coffee cup lid or that onion ring, and think: ‘Perhaps this is just as strong a definition of who we are as anything some sociopolitical journal might stamp on us.’ “It’s looking at the…

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Grant’s riff on conditional thinking reminded me of an acquaintance of mine who calls himself Rotten Apple. He’s a designer whose side work includes small-scale but highly creative “interventions” that transform overlooked urban flotsam into useful or appealing elements of the pedestrian environment. For instance, a clip-on seat could turn a bike stand into a chair; discarded cutting boards converted into chess tables could be installed atop fire hydrants; sudoku puzzles could be imposed on subway station tiles; a jump rope could be made of abandoned construction tape. Rotten Apple is an amazing conditional thinker. On a casual walk through his neighborhood, he can reveal exploitable details of bike racks, explain how plastic traffic barriers are weighted by water, and stop midsentence to collect some stray milk crate or other discard for future use—always noting, in effect, what could be. You don’t have to be a street designer to enjoy the benefits of conditional thinking. Looking for an answer instead of the answer can shift and broaden your vision.

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The great benefit of drawing…is that when you look at something, you see it for the first time. And you can spend your life without ever seeing anything. —MILTON GLASER

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DRAW EVERYTHING DRAWING BRINGS FORTH attention. The many advocates of “sketch noting”—a method of note-taking that relies on an improvised combination of thumbnail drawings and highly selective transcription—are quite vocal about the whys and how-tos of their passion for documenting lectures and classes this way. Carla Diana, a designer and educator, offers an interesting variation on the idea of sketch noting. “I find that drawing everything in sight as isolated objects—like the conference room speakerphone, the saltshaker, the light switch, etc.—helps me to notice each one better,” she said. Deconstructing almost any visual scenario can be revealing. Your desk or your coffee table or your nightstand is likely a jumbled mini-landscape of objects; some shift and move as the days pass, while others are seemingly anchored to their territories. Consider each part separately from the whole. Imagine a series of drawings of each and every thing in your field of vision. Now make that series.

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SKETCH A ROOM YOU JUST LEFT TAKE IN YOUR physical environment carefully, then move to a different one. Now sketch the layout of the room you left. It doesn’t need to be a detailed re-creation, but strive to capture the basics of the space, including what is in it—the positioning of the doors and windows, for instance, and the footprint of the furniture. Try it.

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LOOK FOR THE PLOT WHEN GEOFF MANAUGH, the author of A Burglar’s Guide to the City, walks into a bank or a restaurant, he thinks: If a crime was to occur here—a heist, a robbery—who would be involved? That guy who’s sitting alone in the corner? The one milling around outside? What’s about to happen here? Speculating about what might happen next requires a determined focus on key details. Manaugh compares it to a game. Check out the people at a public event: Who looks familiar and why? Take in the books on the shelves in a stranger’s house: What interests are revealed? When house-hunting in earthquake-prone Los Angeles, Manaugh asked himself: Which part of the structure I am looking at—the wood trim, the uneven framing, or the loose floorboards—offers a clue about what would collapse first should the worst occur? Manaugh admits that something about this way of thinking may sound slightly dark. But, he adds: “I tend to notice things that come in handy later.”

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The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight. —JOHN BERGER

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LOOK LIKE A HISTORIAN A FEW YEARS AGO, Matthew Frye Jacobson noticed something simultaneously startling and mundane while walking around Midtown Manhattan. A massive jumbotron-style screen offered a looped image: a young woman, bouncing soft-pornishly on a trampoline and flashing an improbable smile. Titillating or offensive, she was difficult to miss. What Jacobson, a historian and the chair of American Studies at Yale University, really noticed was how easily we take the likes of Bouncing Jumbotron Woman for granted. He asked his students to consider a photograph of this spectacle. At a glance, they could of course tell that the scene was not from 1930s—or even 1970s—America. They also knew, after a moment of reflection, that there are nations and cultures in the world right now where this scenario couldn’t exist. Jacobson posed a question: What are the preconditions, the things that have to be in place, for this visual to be a casually accepted part of a public environment? The classroom explored the evolution of technology; shifting personal politics and cultural mores; feminism and antifeminism; varied social norms around sex, advertising, and other subjects in different cultures and nation-states; the commercialization of public space; and more. “There was nothing that I could have told them,” Jacobson said, “that would have been as powerful a lesson.” Even the most crass intrusion on our attention holds a secret history that hides in plain sight. Deconstruct it. See the world on your own terms.

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LOOK LIKE A VANDAL SOME OF THE most imaginative observers of the streetscape I have ever known have been street artists. They examine the built environment with an eye toward detecting the spaces that would be most effective to exploit. I’m particularly drawn to the work of street artists whose creations incorporate and transform urban elements. Mark Jenkins, for example, once arranged slices of toast in a street vent, and on another occasion laid out a red carpet that led right into a sewer opening. Artist Oakoak, who works in Europe, has an equally clever style, painting figures that seem to interact with crosswalks and traffic barriers and building elements. Canadian Aiden Glynn adds charming googly eyes to Dumpsters, utility boxes, and other dull features of the street. French artist Clet imposes shadowy figures on traffic signs. I’m not suggesting you become a street artist—not everybody wants to risk jail time for creative expression. But it’s now easy to examine and enjoy such work from around the world on sites like Street Art Utopia. And you can be a street artist in your own mind. Steal the street artist’s way of seeing. Imagine the streets are your canvas. What would you do with them?

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LOOK LIKE A FUTURIST RITA J. KING is a futurist, that most mysterious-sounding of professional categories. She is codirector of a strategic consultancy called Science House, which works with clients from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies, helping them position large and ongoing projects for the future. She plays a similar role for the Science & Entertainment Exchange of the National Academy of Sciences, and has worked with NASA, IBM, and CBS. “You can’t understand the future unless you understand the patterns that got us here,” she says. This means learning about the past and closely observing the present. In particular, she needs an eye for what she calls the “un-inventable details” that are right in front of us if only we’d attend to them. “I’m a radical now-ist,” she says. Here’s a relatively simple exercise she suggests anyone can use. “Pick a spot, a local park or something, where there are people coming and going,” she says. “Sit there for an hour and write down three things you notice about each person that you see. If there’s too many people, just pick one at a time. But just note something. It can be physical or less tangible, like the way their voice sounds or the way they laugh or how their shoulders are hunched or are they wearing a wedding ring. Maybe somebody has a picnic basket for a purse. Whatever.” You may notice patterns or disruptions of patterns. You may learn something about yourself in what you notice. You may notice something that proves unexpectedly helpful in the future.

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LOOK LIKE A BAD GUEST A FRIEND OF MINE once told me: “I’m usually looking for the best way not to be trapped at a place I don’t want to be!” I know this feeling well. I’ve learned how to cope with parties and crowds and other group scenarios that used to make me wildly anxious. But when I walk into those situations, the first thing I do is plot my escape route. My friend does the same. “I’ll back my truck in and park in a spot where I won’t get blocked in when going to social functions I really don’t want to be at,” he says. “Or I’ll take the seat by the back door and look for all the exits. I’d like to say that there is some Jason Bourne reason and that I’m some kind of badass. But I just get annoyed easily and look for ways to slip out unnoticed. In some weird way, it makes me more observant!” If you are anything like my friend or me, you know this intuitively. Next time you’re in one of these uncomfortable situations, observe your own observational behavior—and maybe take a…

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That kind of deep attention that we pay as children is something that I cherish, that I think we all can cherish and reclaim, because attention is that doorway to gratitude, the doorway to wonder, the doorway to reciprocity. And it worries me greatly that today’s children can recognize 100 corporate logos and fewer than ten plants. —ROBIN WALL KIMMERER

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FIND SOMETHING YOU WEREN’T LOOKING FOR AS A KID, Davy Rothbart walked to and from his school bus stop by way of a ball field where various detritus piled up: candy bar wrappers, random papers, trash. “Sometimes I would pick up some note that was blowing in the wind,” he later recalled. “It could be some kid’s homework assignment. But it was at least entertaining reading for the rest of my walk home.” This became a hobby. In college, he enjoyed poking through the abandoned and forgotten leftovers next to the two printers that served hundreds of computers—random email among friends, a highly academic paper about Friday the 13th, whatever. Rothbart’s career began with a note he discovered stuck to his windshield late one night in Chicago. It was addressed to Mario. It said: Mario, I fucking hate you. You said you had to work. Why is your car here at her place? You’re a liar, you’re a fucking liar. I fucking hate you. Amber. Then it said: PS, page me later. Rothbart showed the note to friends. “I was amazed how many of them had great finds to show me in return,” he told me. “Like a kid’s drawing or a weird to-do list, a personal note, a Polaroid. People always seemed to have these things taped to their fridge. It seemed like a shame that only the people that wandered into their kitchen would get to see that stuff.” Rothbart evangelized about the pleasures of the found in what he calls a Johnny Appleseed strategy. He put up flyers looking for others’ finds. “It would give me an excuse to talk to people at parties,” he continued. “You know, ‘Hey, have you guys ever found something?’ Some people would say, ‘No, you’re weird.’ But a shocking number of people were like, ‘Yeah, my roommate found something great last week; we’ll send it to you.’ ” He self-published Found, a zine collecting such treasures. This led to books, film projects, an online community. “It has changed my life,” Rothbart said. “Noticing these little pieces of paper just brought me out of my own head.” Looking at the world, engaging with other people—these are skills that fuel his career as a writer, creator of audio stories for This American Life and his own podcast, and independent filmmaker. They’re also at the heart of the workshops he runs for aspiring audio producers and others. Finding something can mean “rescuing it from oblivion,” he mused, which is “kind of a noble act.” It takes only a moment to stop and pick something up to determine whether it’s interesting. “You’ll never know,” Rothbart said, “unless you take a look.” Put yourself on the lookout for the potentially interesting as you move through the world: on the metro, at bus stops, on campuses, at work; in bowling alleys, parking lots, even prison yards. Not every discarded napkin or receipt will fascinate, but one in twenty might. The discards of others can be windows into lives you’d never otherwise see—fragments of stories that open us to wonder and curiosity.

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Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. —JOHN CAGE

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IN THE PBS Digital Studios series Art Assignment, Jace Clayton (also known as DJ /rupture) offered a simple set of instructions. Go for a walk outside, he advised, but make it a point to head out in the direction that seems the most quiet. Keep going until you find the quietest spot in your vicinity that you can. Now stop, and be in that place. “Take a moment to absorb it,” as his instructions put it. Clayton also suggested you document where you are and upload that documentation to social media with the tag #theartassignment. That’s fine, but to me it is not required. Just make sure you really follow through on absorbing what you either hear or don’t hear.

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On the other hand, what do you really know about your personal sonic profile? Spend just a few hours or a day monitoring yourself. Listen to and think about the sounds you make—walking, typing, clearing the dishes, talking, singing along with a favorite tune. Take notes. Experiment with making as little sound as possible and then with making as much sound as possible, and note how this changes your concentration, the way you move, the speed at which you perform routine tasks.

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MAKE AN AUDITORY INVENTORY ONE OF MY STUDENTS began collecting sounds. Before going to sleep, she’d listen intently, striving to pick out and identify every noise. A distant barking dog. The hum of the air conditioner. A passing car. Applying this idea over time can be a way to rediscover a familiar setting. Collecting at a particular time of day is a useful organizing device. Begin to note sounds consciously. Build an inventory. Keep hunting. You’ll hear things you’d missed altogether.

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attention and what hasn’t can be instructive. Just take a half hour, anywhere, and really notice what you notice. Sometimes what we need is the confidence to believe that what we notice actually matters: After all, if nobody else ever mentions it, we might think it’s just not that important. Get over that feeling. It’s precisely the stuff everybody else has missed that ought to make us think twice. Why do you always notice this, and why doesn’t anyone else seem to?

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later, their grandson Eames Demetrios organized a Powers of Ten exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences. “Scale is like geography,” he observed at the time. “If you don’t know where Afghanistan is when you hear it mentioned in the news, you won’t have a place to hang it in your mind. Numbers are the same. Anthrax is measured in microns; pesticide residues are reported in parts per billion. These numbers are important to our lives—we should be able to understand what they mean.”

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Take a fresh look at any environment. Pause to change scale by focusing on details; maybe use your phone’s camera zoom to heighten what your eyes can perceive. Now stop and think about the “big picture”—about where you are, in a scale you can’t see yourself but can only imagine.

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“There are two types of religions in the world, transcendent and immanent,” his reply began. “The former are religions that typically grew up in desert surroundings where God is seen as living above and beyond, ‘sky god’ religions. The latter are religions that grew up in forest surroundings where God is seen as living inside all things, pagan, folk religions.” It was the latter he wanted me to consider, specifically Japanese Shinto practices. Westerners, he told me, often see Shinto adherents as exhibiting a “kind of stylized reverence toward everything.” So James teaches his clients that “they can borrow that and do a kind of daily Shinto practice toward everything and everyone they come across.” We can imbue “everything with a little god spirit. So my laptop has a little god inside it. So does this cup of water. So do my shoes. Et cetera.” This might sound a bit mystical. But although James frames it in the context of religion, finding the “god spirit” doesn’t actually require any particular religious orthodoxy—or really, any religious faith at all.

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Even in one single leaf on a tree, or in one blade of grass, the awesome deity presents itself. —SHINTO SAYING

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Abramović may be best known for her performance The Artist Is Present, which involved her showing up at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and sitting across from patrons, one at a time. For as long as they wanted, Abramović sat and the two would silently regard each other. She has also devised a series of exercises called the Abramović Method, which involves focusing on one particular action as a recurring theme. The Abramović Method workshops include activities such as a period of silently regarding another attendee or walking incredibly slowly across a room. Other exercises involve drinking a glass of water with such deliberation and concentration that it takes as long as twenty minutes; spending a full ten minutes writing out your name a single time; and counting every grain in a huge pile of rice. Elsewhere, Abramović has underscored the importance of solitude by declaring that an artist should “stay for long periods of time” at waterfalls, fast-running rivers, and (rather more improbably) erupting volcanoes, as well as taking lengthy looks at the horizon and at the stars in the night sky.

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Try re-creating the spirit of Abramović’s Goldberg in regular life. Next time you have a dinner out planned with someone you care about, arrive (or plant yourself nearby) early. And do nothing. Observe the world; think about the person you’re about to see; cleanse your mental palate of other obligations or distractions. A significant moment deserves a considered prelude. Be ready.

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See how this affects your urge to “connect.” See if it changes your own standards about what you need to communicate and why. I’ve often wondered what we would see if Facebook or Twitter or Instagram enforced such limits—if we were allowed only three updates a month, let’s say. Or what if we could instant message just two people per week? Would this make us restrict ourselves to saying only what really mattered? Would our “networks” appreciate that? Would you?

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With this in mind, Antonelli suggested: Think of your phone as a kind of divining rod that might help you discover what’s interesting and notable and worthy of a short video. Do this “wherever you choose,” she continued, “your bedroom, your grandfather’s farm, a dim sum restaurant, the subway.” You might jump from one designed object to another, constructing a kind of narrative. Decide how many you want to feature and why. Edit the video down to a single minute that depicts a place and the things defining it.

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And it reminds me of something furniture designer George Nelson once asked: “Can you describe the colors and patterns of any rug in your dwelling? The wallpaper in the bedroom? The pictures in the front hall? When were they last looked at?”

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Imagine following the spirit of a silence vow into daily life. Challenge yourself to spend an entire day saying only what you absolutely must say. It’s been widely observed by behavioral psychology experts—and anyone who’s ever been on a first date—that we too often tend to treat “conversation” as a game of waiting for our own turn to speak. We miss what’s being said because we’re mentally rehearsing our next utterance.

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