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Productivity is this idea of having something to show for your time, putting something new in the world that wasn't there before.

And, you know, like a thing, right? Like here's the thing that I made. It's a deliverable, right?

Versus creativity, I would say, is much more about observing what is already there in front of you and making new observations about it and also making new connections between things that already exist.

Music

Hello and welcome to the ESO Clancho on the Vox Media Podcast Network. My guest today is Jenny Odell.

And Jenny Odell is an artist and a writer living in Oakland, California. She's been an artist in residence at Recall G.S.F.

Better known as the Dump, the San Francisco Planning Department, the Year of a Boy in a Center for the Arts, Facebook, the Internet Archive.

She's been teaching Internet art and digital and physical design at Stanford since 2013.

And she's also the author of a new book called How to Do Nothing.

And I wanted to have Odell on for a couple of reasons. One is it in the series we're doing about the intersection of attention and creativity and thought.

I think that you need to see it from some perspectives outside the ones we typically look at.

And contemporary art is one of those. She's got some beautiful lines in this interview, but she talks quoting another artist about the way in which what modern artists do is their orchestrators of attention.

They take people, they take us and they force our attention to work in different ways and at different scales in a culture that is constantly trying to optimize us towards letting our attention work in one way and at one scale faster, faster, faster.

And so she's a really, I think, interesting and beautiful perspective on this both about what is the value of time and how to value it.

What is the role that nature and natural context plays in pulling us out of an increasingly decontextualized society?

What is the role that art and the poetics play in or can play in getting us to think of all this in a different way?

This is one of those fun interviews where it's somebody who really sees it well differently than I do and helps me see it a little bit, I think, more clearly or at least more openly than I did before.

As always, my email is at as recluncho at box.com again as recluncho at box.com talk a bit in here about how much I appreciate the emails you all send. So thank you for doing that.

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