Attention transforms raw information into images rather than choosing among made ones

Evidence

As they line up several pairs of eyes in front of a neglected work, the low tech exercises practised by the Birds constitute a laboratory in which the processes that in reality ‘shape’ all of the images that affect us can be observed and experienced with great subtlety. As we have been repeating since the beginning of this book, attention functions as a selection operator. However, as Mark Hansen helps us to clarify, attention does not select between preformed images, but amongst information which is only constituted into images through this operation – an operation that transforms information into signification, thanks to a labour of the frame (enframing, deframing, reframing). — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 445

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharpens the book’s core definition of attention: a selection operator that constitutes images from information, not a chooser among preformed images.
• XREF: Builds on the ‘attention as selection operator’ thread repeated since the book’s opening; connects conceptually to Hayles and Hansen’s embodiment. — connects to: Images gain meaning only through each receiver’s embodied reprocessing operations; Digital images subject attention to objective abstractions preconfigured by protocols — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 209; Decontextualized photographs charge us through the gap between others’ importance and our indifference