Attention and the making of meaning
cleidi hearn
Meaning within contemporary culture is often sought as a stable object that can be retrieved, decoded or explained. Cultural consumption tends to expect immediate clarity, fast aesthetic legibility and identifiable thematic content. Yet certain practices resist this transactional model of interpretation. They approach meaning not as a substance that sits behind the work but as something that arises within the encounter itself. This shift in orientation toward contingency and perception rather than symbolism forms part of the conceptual space in which botanica brasilis operates.
A useful starting point is the status of process in the contemporary image economy. Many cultural images arrive pre-loaded with intention, argument or emotional direction. Their purpose is declared rather than discovered. In contrast, attention-based practices position process as a perceptual condition rather than an internal studio procedure. The process is not the technique or the sequence of gestures used to produce an image. It is the time, attention and willingness required from a viewer for meaning to become possible at all. In this sense, process is not owned by the maker. It is shared by all participants in the encounter between viewer and work.
This perspective aligns with broader conversations within phenomenology and environmental humanities, where perception is treated as active rather than receptive. Meaning is not delivered from the work to the viewer. It emerges from the relation between them. This does not make meaning arbitrary or subjective. It makes meaning contingent on duration and attentional discipline. The refusal to offer symbol, metaphor or narrative stabilisation is not an absence but a structural decision. It withholds predetermined interpretation so that perception has room to operate.
Within this frame, accusations of neutrality or blandness reveal more about contemporary habits of looking than about the work itself. In a culture accustomed to symbolic immediacy, a refusal to provide thematic instruction can be misread as a lack rather than a position. Yet this withholding invites a different form of engagement. Viewers who arrive expecting symbolic content may leave unsatisfied. Viewers who remain with the work without extracting from it may discover that the work has stakes that do not announce themselves. The possibility of meaning remains open but not guaranteed.
This has ethical implications. When meaning depends on attention rather than extraction, the work resists instrumentalisation. It does not offer the plant as metaphor, icon or evidence. It does not mobilise botanical subjects for moral persuasion or biographical narrative. Instead it constructs a field in which vegetal subjecthood can be encountered without conversion into message. This subtlety can be misinterpreted as elitism when viewed from the perspective of symbolic consumption. Yet it is the opposite. It removes the requirement for specialised knowledge and replaces it with ordinary perceptual faculties: time, attention and willingness. These are not elitist conditions. They are democratic conditions that contemporary attention economies often erode.
When meaning is contingent rather than declared, the viewer’s role changes. Interpretation becomes less about decoding and more about participation. The highest insight may not be conceptual or thematic. It may be the perceptual act itself. In such cases the process becomes the meaning, not as a tautology but as a phenomenological claim. The significance of the work resides in the encounter and not beyond it. Other forms of meaning may appear for viewers who remain within that field. These meanings are not invalid. They are conditional on the process that enabled them.
This approach does not reject meaning. It relocates meaning within the event of perception. In an era of accelerated image consumption, this reorientation offers a quiet counterpoint to dominant cultural rhythms. It asks what forms of attention are still possible and what kinds of subjects become visible under those conditions. The answer is never fixed and never promised. It is contingent on how one chooses to see.
