Organising Attention
by Sofia Wiberg

Throughout Jacob Dahlgren’s practice, there is a recurring interest in how we look at the world around us. Everyday objects, colours, patterns and forms are brought into focus, making the familiar appear differently. I understand his practice as a way of cultivating attention, inviting us to develop other ways of seeing and relating to the world.

In The Flag Project, this practice of attention takes on a collective dimension. Dahlgren invites a group of people, for a limited period of time, to explore and work within a common framework. Through this process, attention becomes a shared practice, while still allowing for different ways of seeing.

This question of attention extends beyond Dahlgren’s work. In a time of information abundance, attention has become an increasingly scarce resource. As early as 1971, the social scientist Herbert Simon observed that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”. Attention, from this perspective, is something that has to be directed and distributed. We cannot attend to everything around us at once. Seeing is therefore always selective: in order for some things to come into focus, others have to recede. What we learn to attend to shapes what becomes visable to us.

In The Flag Project, these questions are explored through a shared process. The project has been carried out in many places around the world, involving people of different ages, from children to older adults. Despite these varying contexts, a clear structure recurs. At the beginning of each workshop, Dahlgren introduces participants to his way of noticing abstraction in everyday life. He shows images from his ongoing photographic project Signs of Abstraction, for which he has spent many years photographing abstract forms and patterns encountered in his surroundings. He accompanies the images with personal stories, somewhat like someone showing a family album to friends. Participants are then invited to look for abstract forms in their own everyday surroundings and to use what they notice as starting points for sketches for flags. In this way, Dahlgren introduces a way of working with attention that each participant can take further in their own way.

What interests me here is what happens when this practice becomes collective. The participants work within the same framework, yet each of them takes it in a different direction. It becomes a common structure within which different ways of seeing and making can take shape.

Does a common framework require us to move towards the same ways of seeing, thinking and doing? I have been concerned with similar issues for a long time in relation to urban planning and public space. Within planning, there is currently a strong interest in inviting residents to participate in different forms of co-creation and participatory processes, often with the ambition of arriving at something shared: a collective vision, an agreed direction or a solution that everyone can endorse. I have long been interested in, but also critical of, parts of this practice. My critique has primarily concerned the assumption that the encounter itself will bridge differences in interests and perspectives and lead towards consensus. The language of co-creation can also obscure asymmetrical power relations and create ambiguity around what participants are actually able to influence.

In The Flag Project, co-creation takes a different form. There is a clarity about who has established the framework and what that framework consists of. Dahlgren has decided that the outcome will take the form of flags, that they will be abstract, that there is a defined number of colours and a particular working process. The framework makes certain flags impossible. Within the field that remains, however, no one knows exactly what will emerge.

In the book Free Play, Stephen Nachmanovitch writes that limits create intensity. Adhering to a set of rules, he argues, can free the music, allowing it to acquire a depth and force that would otherwise be difficult to achieve. I think something similar happens in The Flag Project. The constraints do not seem to diminish variation. Rather, the clearer the framework, the more visible the variation becomes. Many people work within the same constraints, and yet different flags emerge.

When certain choices have already been made, attention can deepen within the field that remains. Which colours should I choose? What happens if I make this shape larger, repeat it, or place one colour next to another? These are simple decisions, but they can draw attention to small differences in colour, form and relation. In this sense, constraint can cultivate a sensitivity to difference. Small variations gain greater significance when so much else is held constant. Within a narrower field, subtle variations can begin to register with greater intensity.

Yet the framework also shapes which differences become noticeable in the first place. When participants begin looking for abstract forms in their everyday surroundings, certain relations, colours and patterns become more visible, while other things move outside the field of vision. Attention, in this sense, is never neutral. It helps shape what becomes perceptually salient. The framework thus creates conditions for what can appear. It also creates a form within which the participants’ different actions can gradually become part of something shared.

Here, the flag itself becomes interesting. A flag usually serves to bring people together. It can mark a nation, an organisation, an identity, a political movement or another form of belonging. It can distinguish an us from a them. A flag says, in some sense: this is who we are. But in The Flag Project there is no single shared flag. There are many, and they are abstract. They do not need to represent a shared identity or carry a common message. None of them needs to speak for the others. What is shared therefore does not arise through the participants agreeing on a symbol that will represent them. Instead, the different flags are allowed to exist alongside one another. Perhaps this offers another image of the collective: not one form representing everyone, but a framework capable of holding many forms at once.

When the colourful abstract flags hang together, it is easy to experience them as a whole. They are beautiful together, they create rhythm, variation, perhaps even a kind of harmony. Yet this visual coherence does not resolve their differences. One flag does not need to explain itself to the flag beside it, nor do they need to arrive at a common position. They can rub against one another, compete for attention, disappear behind one another, or suddenly become more prominent depending on where you stand.

In The Flag Project, participants contribute to a collective work without having to agree on a single expression or on what the flags should mean. They do not even need to make the flags at the same time or together. And yet their actions gradually form something collective that none of them could have created alone. What is shared does not necessarily reside in agreement, shared intentions or a unified expression. It resides in the practice itself: in a temporary arrangement of people, fabric, colours, stories, rules, sewing machines, spaces, movements and attention. I like the thought that this collective practice does not require participants to be continuously attentive to one another. Their actions are connected through the framework, each person notices, selects and makes in their own way, while contributing to a growing collection of flags.

Cultivating Attention

Simone Weil describes attention as a practice. Every genuine effort of attention, she argues, increases our capacity to attend. For Weil, attention is not primarily a matter of concentration in the sense of directing all one’s force towards a predetermined goal. Rather, it involves a degree of patience and openness: attending to what is before us without deciding too quickly what it means or what we expect to find.

If attention is a practice, it is also something that can be cultivated. Our ways of seeing are shaped by what we have learned to notice, the questions we ask and the activities in which we participate. The forms we create for shared attention can reinforce familiar habits of seeing, but they can also help us become sensitive to what we might otherwise overlook. Dahlgren’s practice interests me as an invitation to spend time developing this sensitivity through the everyday acts of looking and making.

The Flag Project brings these questions of attention and collectivity together. It creates a collective practice of looking and making in which different ways of seeing can coexist.