Is attention to something always an argument for the thing's importance?

Or can the attention itself be the important thing?

I am here trying to write about a digital scatter of discarded objects.

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An aggressive silence.

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Through the wall, the chirp and mewling of some distant manufacture.

“Super Big Mac Shrunk.”

A brag, and a confession of meekness.

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The lyric poets make an argument for transcendance, for shimmering distinctions, for particular lives.

(“Leaves of grass.”)

The internet makes an argument for neglect. For manufactured goop.

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Does an image have a voice?

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Where do voices come from?

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When I am still, in my home, I hear breeze, and birds, and the freeway.

When I am online, I am surrounded by silence.

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The intrusiveness—abrupt and erotic—in clicking, zooming. Cursor touching an image. Everything made flat. Context vacuumed away.

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You can't touch the digital. Nothing is actually there.

Clouds, digital clouds.

(Where is the cloud, exactly? Over our heads?)

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Some of the objects, the rusted, mottled ones—easily invite the gutter aesthete's attention to surfaces.

(I am a gutter aesthete.)

But what about the blank ones, the simple ones? Objects that refuse to be interesting. Our attention to them becomes an argument—with ourselves. With the impersonal voice of some careless maker.

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Tenderness—an old-fashioned word.

Tenderness—a quality of attention.

Tenderness—love buffetted by neglect, destruction, and exquisite disregard.

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Is there a 'we' here?

Is any of this ours?

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A garlic bulb that looks like a tooth. The spreading of the stalks. The back of a little girl's head.

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A math problem:

desire of the one who made it (impersonal) + desire of the one who acquired it (careless) = some quantity (n) of desire

n quantity of desire * the desire of the one who collects and documents (meticulous) = ? Please show your work.

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This dark, silent place. Why does it feel so much like touch?

Digital. Digit, like finger.

Someone found these things, someone touched them.

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In the shattered mirror surface I think I can see your fingers reflected.

Art and Concept - Sky Murray

Photography - Perri Hofmann

Text - Agnes Borinsky

Website - Jacob Hamrick