Editors: Sílvia Pinto Coelho, Luís Mendonça, Erik Bordeleau

The arts and artistic practices create specific modes and mediations that involve variations in attention. They perform a “tuning of the attention” which generates cadences, movements and intensities between different types of focus of fluctuating, and varyingly disinterested or distracted attention. Attention is always in movement, and it is always more or less at the service of a desire, an intention, a task, a need or a volition.

The study of variations in attention in the arts, notably the performing arts and cinema, is also linked to how we perceive the world and choose what we want to show. Sensitivity is tuned to give visibility to something previously confused with the landscape, highlighting it or co-composing with it. When we choose a cutout, a framework for what we are going to share, we create a surplus—everything we choose not to show—and a margin, which is within the cutout of what is shown but is not reinforced as “the most relevant.”

Drawing on how financial derivatives reconfigure the relation to risk and value in financial markets, Randy Martin’s social logic of the derivative emphasises the power of seemingly minor variations in relation to the transductive, aesthetic and affective dimensions of risk and value. Martin’s conception of criticality as an ongoing practice of evaluation illuminates how attentional practices in the arts also serve a speculative function, creating value through the very act of selective focus while simultaneously generating new forms of coming together and political possibility.

In these choices, we can also observe some modes of operation that are common in the arts and politics. Various possibilities of choice are present between what is considered relevant to see and make visible, and what is left out of attention, with its consequent implications. What we do not see (or hear, or smell) of the figure/ground, context and focus, movement, drag, or blur is very broad and demands great “attention training” so that it becomes possible to play, share, and live the arts, sciences, and everyday life in common.

Yves Citton’s The Ecology of Attention (2017) provides a crucial framework for understanding these attentional dynamics as fundamentally relational and environmental. His ecology conceives attention not as an individual cognitive resource to be optimised, but as a collective, distributed phenomenon that emerges from the interaction between bodies, technologies, and environments. This ecological approach reveals how attentional practices create and sustain particular forms of life while foreclosing others, demanding that we consider the ethical and political stakes of how we collectively organise our perceptual capacities.

The word “cadences,” on the other hand, carries a procedural and dynamic dimension that is not only related to modulations and rhythms, but also to falls. “Cadere,” a word that has the same origin as “cadence,” contains the idea of falling. We can fall into, or out of, a particular type of attention, curiosity, or passion. We can flow in attention through falls, as happens in surfing or Contact Improvisation. These possibilities describe well the way we live in constant “improvisation.”

We can also create cracks, gaps within the “hyper-high-tech” (Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy) or “dromospheric” (Paul Virilio) system in which we live, through which we can inscribe some form of “slowing down” anti-discourse or “deprogram” (Flusser), regenerate and “counter-pirate” (Jorge Vieira) that which already prevails and tends to surveil, direct and condition – or even punish and colonise – our movements, actions and focuses of attention. In short, how can we interfere in the generalised framework of inattentive and interpassive inattention (Mark Fisher) to establish, “within it” and/or “against it”, a new ecology of images (Susan Sontag)?

If we discuss cadences, we can also consider coincidences, specifically the gesture or movement of “inciding on” or, more precisely, “falling on”. In a world dominated by virtual images and the screens that transmit them, reality gives way to simulation and the indeterminate space of the Internet (Baudrillard). Reality sometimes coincides with its simulation and is often surpassed by it. How can we situate all these coincidences and dis-coincidences in the field of the arts, when terms such as “computer art” or “realism” seem increasingly redundant or insufficient, urgently in need of critical updating?

In cinema, issues related to the acceleration of everyday life and the dispersion of information in a “screened” reality often arise in the debate between accelerationists and retardationists, which is frequently framed as a debate between fast cinema and slow cinema. Authors such as Matthew Flanagan, Tiago de Luca, and Steven Shaviro emphasise the importance of slowing down or, conversely, accelerating the pace of cinema as a means of political intervention in reality. The issue of attention thus emerges as decisive both for thinking about and diagnosing society and for reimagining and conceiving it differently. Slow cinema emerges, then, as a crucial practice for cultivating what we might call the “arts of immanent attention” (Isabelle Stengers). This immanent attention resists the extractivist logics of attention economies by refusing to surrender attention as a commodity, promoting instead a sustained and undirected awareness that allows for unexpected encounters and transformations.

In 2013, the colloquium “Movement and Technical Mobilisation” promoted by the now extinct Centre for Communication and Languages launched the motto for RCL – Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens with the same theme. It can be said that “Cadences, Movements of Attention in the Arts and Everyday Life” draws its inspiration from that other initial “movement” and that this publication, in some way, continues and pays homage to RCL itself, at a time when it changed its format and style. In 2016, issue #45/46 of RCL was the last RCL magazine published on paper. In 2025, RCL turns forty years old!

At the international conference “Cadences: Movements of Attention in the Arts and Everyday Life,” held by ICNOVA in May 2025, the emphasis was placed on attention as a fundamental feature of artistic processes and everyday mediation. In this call for papers, we are broadening the thematic scope to include, in addition to the cadences of movement attention, coincidences, kinetic and kinematic affectations, and their respective political consequences.

We invite submissions of articles that explore modes and ecologies of attention, considering the “echo” of sound resonance, and the ecology of relationships as an intricate web of inter-affections.  

We accept proposals on movements of attention linked to the arts and everyday life, articles, visual essays, or reviews on the following topics (among others):

– Mediation of attention.
– Attention theft and attention deficit.
– Arts, crafts, handicrafts, and workshops in their relationship with attention.
– Performance studies.
– Accelerationism and slowness.
– Ecology of images and generative piracy.
– Dramaturgies of attention.
– Attention, affection, and care.
– Transindividual attention and community

Articles can be written in English, French, Spanish or Portuguese and will be blind peer reviewed. Visual essays will also be accepted. Formatting must be in accordance with the journal’s submission guidelines, and the submission must be made via the OJS platform.

+ info: https://revistas.fcsh.unl.pt/rcl/announcement/view/9