This course explores an essential event at the heart of inquiry: the composition of attention — its catalogue of shapes and movements and the manner in which it gathers and disperses. Engaging with this precarious and enigmatic aspect of cognition requires the mingling of methods and that—whether one’s project is in service of sense, sound, image, thing—episodes like interruption, repetition, and detour are rendered not as obstacles to fruition, but as signals alerting us to what is most precious and specious. Alongside the realization of artistic/academic aims then is the possibility of being initiated to the contours of one’s peculiar attentive faculty. This course orbits two points: a history of attention that surveys its conceptualization over the last few centuries, and an infancy of attention that concerns its momentary emergence within our formal experiments, and during the more pedestrian excursions about town.