Thesis Advisor: Amit S. Rai

November 2022

Abstract

Attention spasms are a methodology of looking at things and engaging with the contemporary problem of attention. In trying to understand and share these gestures, this thesis engages with a variety of theories and thinkers, as well as found objects, such as pop music videos to restructure today’s habituated attention spans. It develops its analysis with experimentation and collective practice while using neurodivergence as a tool, or toy, or map, or diagram of sorts to deconstruct pan-pornographic aesthetics of digital media ecologies. 

In this document’s escape from providing solutions, it comes up with further questions: What does a materialist diagram of entanglement in the powers of arousal, the abject and its (anti-)affect look like? How can one explore the biopolitics of pornography historically and in our present? And what constitutes a revolutionary line of flight from pornographic technologies, linking it to emancipatory politics around race, queerness, feminism, and class?

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