Precedent Catalogue

Devices of Attention

1. Letting the process mark the device

These devices are acted on directly by the phenomenon; they record rather than display. This is the clearest model of the brief's "participation, not representation."

Precedent	What it does	Highlights
Campbell–Stokes sunshine recorder (19th c.)	A glass sphere focuses sunlight and burns a track into a card; the card is changed daily.	The sun writes its own record. The daily card change is a built-in protocol.
Charles Ross, Sunlight Convergence/Solar Burn (1971–72)	A lens burned a plank each day for a year; the burns trace the sun's changing path and the weather.	A year of daily returns produces one artifact. Clouds register as absences.
Hans Haacke, Condensation Cube (1963–65)	A sealed acrylic box whose internal water condenses and runs in response to room temperature and light.	A closed system made responsive to its surroundings. No electronics.
Olafur Eliasson, Your sun machine (1997)	A circular hole cut into a gallery roof; the sun's disc travels across the walls and floor through the day.	Subtraction as a device. The building becomes an instrument by removing material.
Smout Allen, Retreating Village and the Augmented Landscapes projects	Speculative architectural instruments that register and negotiate slow landscape forces such as coastal erosion.	Devices calibrated to forces too slow to see. Drawings that hold instrument and landscape together.
Aeolian harp (historical)	Strings set in a window or opening sound when the wind passes over them.	The process plays the instrument; the human only listens and places it.
Kusari-doi rain chains (Japan)	Chains or cups replace a downspout, making rain's path down a building visible and audible.	An everyday, unspectacular device that turns runoff into attention.

2. Framing, aligning, and orienting the body

These devices do little to the phenomenon; instead they position the body so it can be met. Attention comes from alignment, cropping, and orientation.

Precedent	What it does	Highlights
Nancy Holt, Locators (1971–72)	Steel pipes on stands that fix the viewer's eye on a specific point in the landscape.	Body-scale framing. Compare with her later Sun Tunnels (1973–76), where the same operation is scaled up to solstice alignments.
Analemmatic sundials with a human gnomon	The person stands on a date-marked line and their own shadow tells the time.	The body is literally the instrument; without it, nothing works.

Moon-viewing platform, Katsura Imperial Villa (17th c.)	A bamboo platform oriented toward the rising moon over the pond.	A minimal structure built around a cyclical ceremony, not a one-time spectacle.
Camera obscura (historical)	A darkened enclosure that projects the outside world through a small aperture.	Darkness and aperture as the design operations. Many body-scale variants exist.
James Turrell, Skyspaces	Rooms with an opening in the ceiling that recompose how the sky's colour is perceived at dusk and dawn.	The edge of the aperture. Note the scale problem: the operation needs a building, so what survives at the scale of a body?
Kiesler, Vision Machine (c. 1938–42)	An unbuilt apparatus modelling how seeing and imagining happen.	A device about perception itself, rather than about an object out there.

3. Translating the imperceptible across the senses

These devices make fields, forces, or distant events sensible by moving them into another sense. Here the brief's question about screens and sensors becomes urgent: does the mediation serve the encounter or replace it?

Precedent	What it does	Highlights
Christina Kubisch, Electrical Walks (2004–)	Walkers wear headphones that make the electromagnetic fields of a city audible.	The grid as cosmos. Walking is the protocol, and the city becomes the score.
Moon Ribas, Seismic Sense	A body implant that vibrates in response to earthquakes around the world.	A continuous, lifelong relation to a planetary process. Raises real questions about consent and permanence.
Katie Paterson, Vatnajökull (the sound of) (2007)	A phone number connected to a microphone in a glacier lagoon; callers hear the ice melt live.	Mediation at its thinnest: a phone call. The body has to choose to call.
Katie Paterson, Earth–Moon–Earth (2007)	Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata sent as Morse code to the moon and back; the gaps are where the moon's surface absorbed the signal.	The process alters the message. A clear case of a device being acted on.
Semiconductor, Magnetic Movie (2007)	A film rendering magnetic fields around a NASA lab as moving forms.	A useful counter-example: compelling, but screen-bound. Ask what a body could do instead.
Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada, Animal Superpowers (2008)	Wearables that give children the perceptual abilities of animals, such as an ant's magnified vision.	Speculative wearables that change perception rather than deliver information.

4. Extending, enclosing, and prosthetic bodies

These works operate at exactly the brief's scale, between the hand and the enclosure of one person. Most are not about the cosmos, so the task is to borrow how they reorganize the body and point that at a larger process.

Precedent	What it does	Highlights
Haus-Rucker-Co, Mind Expander (1967) and Flyhead (1968)	Pneumatic seats and helmets that alter perception and how two bodies share space.	Enclosure as a perceptual operation. Mind Expander requires two people.
Walter Pichler, TV Helmet (Portable Living Room) (1967)	A helmet that encloses the head with a screen.	A critique of mediated perception, made in 1967. Read it against your own use of screens.
Archigram (Michael Webb), Cushicle (1966) and Suitaloon (1968)	Architecture collapsed into something carried or worn.	The threshold between garment and shelter.
Lygia Clark, Sensorial Masks and Respire comigo (1966)	Hoods, tubes, and objects that redirect breath, sight, smell, and touch toward the wearer's own sensations.	Devices that turn attention toward the body as a site of encounter. Very simple materials.
Rebecca Horn, Unicorn (1970) and Finger Gloves (1972)	Body extensions that change reach, balance, and touch.	How a prosthesis changes the whole body's posture and movement, not only one sense.
Tomás Saraceno, Aerocene Backpack	A kit for launching a sculpture lifted only by the sun's heat and carried by the wind.	A carried device whose flight depends entirely on atmospheric conditions.
Krzysztof Wodiczko, Homeless Vehicle (1988–89) and Alien Staff (1992)	Devices built with and for marginalized people that make them visible and heard in public space.	Devices of civic attention. A strong counterpoint to design that speaks for others.
Lucy Orta, Refuge Wear (1990s)	Garments that convert into shelters.	The body's minimum enclosure as a political argument.

5. Accumulating over long durations

These works design for a time signature far longer than a single encounter. They show how a device can be lived with over a season, a lifetime, or beyond.

Precedent	What it does	Highlights
Lake Suwa ice records, Japan (since 1443)	Shinto priests have recorded the date and form of the ice ridge that forms on the lake in winter.	A ritual that became one of the longest climate records anywhere. Attention sustained by ceremony.
Nilometer, Roda Island, Cairo (9th c.)	A graduated column in a stepped well measured the Nile's annual flood.	A measurement tied to harvest, taxes, and festivals. The reading had consequences for everyone.
Katie Paterson, Future Library (2014–2114)	A forest planted in Norway will supply paper for a century of manuscripts held unread until 2114.	A device whose completion outlives its makers. Annual handover ceremonies are its protocol.
John Cage, ORGAN²/ASLSP, Halberstadt (2001–2640)	An organ performance scheduled to last 639 years; chord changes happen years apart.	Duration so long that each change becomes an event people travel to witness.
Japanese 72 microseasons (kō)	The year divided into 72 periods of about five days, each named for a small natural change.	A calendar as a device of attention. Fine grain makes the year noticeable.
Phenology journals (e.g. Thoreau, Leopold)	Records of first blooms, arrivals of birds, ice-out dates, kept year after year.	The notebook as instrument. Repetition reveals change only over many returns.

6. Protocols, rituals, and returning

In these works the conditions of use do most of the design work. They are useful for writing your own protocol of attention: what the body must do, for how long, when, and how often.

Precedent	What it does	Highlights
Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field (1977)	Visitors stay overnight in small groups at a remote cabin, regardless of whether lightning comes.	The protocol is the work. Waiting without a guaranteed event.
Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening	Practices and scores for listening to everything, including one's own listening.	A protocol with no device at all. Pair it with a device and see what changes.
Hildegard Westerkamp, soundwalking	Walks structured around listening to an environment's sound.	Movement and route as a frame for attention.
Tehching Hsieh, Time Clock Piece (1980–81)	The artist punched a time clock every hour for a year and photographed himself each time.	Extreme repetition. What a strict hourly protocol does to a body and to a year.
Marshall Islands stick charts	Navigational models of ocean swells, memorized before voyages; navigators read the swells through the body.	Knowledge carried in the body; the object serves learning. See the note below.

A note on Indigenous cosmotechnics. Many of the most powerful cosmological devices, including Pacific navigation and the medicine wheels of the Alberta plains, belong to living knowledge systems. Study them through sources written or authorized by those communities, credit them properly, and do not borrow their forms or ceremonies for your device. Their lesson for this brief lies in how they tie knowledge to the body and to practice.

7. Shared and civic attention

These are ordinary, contemporary examples. Many people attend to a larger process through a simple device and a shared protocol, without any spectacle.

Precedent	What it does	Highlights
CoCoRaHS (US and Canada)	Volunteers read a standard rain gauge in their yard every morning and report it.	A cheap device, a daily protocol, and a continental watershed assembled from backyards.
Globe at Night	Participants count visible stars in a given constellation to track light pollution.	Absence as data. The body's dark adaptation becomes part of the instrument.
Olafur Eliasson and Frederik Ottesen, Little Sun (2012)	A handheld solar lamp charged by day and used at night.	A daily cycle of charging and use that ties a household to the sun.
Natalie Jeremijenko, Feral Robotic Dogs	Toy robot dogs retrofitted with sensors that sniff out pollutants, run by community groups.	Playful public devices that make an invisible process a shared civic concern.
Weather houses (folk device)	Small figures that move in and out with humidity.	A domestic, low-tech device that responds directly to the atmosphere. Watch for nostalgia.

8. Speculative design and architecture practices

These practices produce whole bodies of work worth browsing. Use them for hybrid drawing techniques as much as for devices.

Practice	Why look	Start with
Smout Allen	Architectural instruments that register slow environmental processes.	Augmented Landscapes (Pamphlet Architecture 28)
Nat Chard	Drawing instruments that capture chance and uncertainty in architectural representation.	His drawing instrument series
Perry Kulper	Drawings that work as speculative mechanisms.	His layered, mixed-media drawings
Dunne & Raby	Objects designed to provoke questions rather than solve problems.	Placebo Project; Speculative Everything (2013)
Auger-Loizeau	Speculative products tied to bodies and everyday rituals.	Afterlife; Audio Tooth Implant
Superflux	Speculative futures made tangible through objects and environments.	Mitigation of Shock (2017)
Unknown Fields Division (Liam Young, Kate Davies)	Expeditions to extraction landscapes that produce artifacts and films.	Their expedition projects
Lateral Office	Speculative infrastructure for extreme environments, especially the North.	Their Arctic projects
Katie Paterson	Artworks that put people in contact with deep time and cosmic scale through modest means.	Timepieces (Solar System); Light bulb to Simulate Moonlight
Haus-Rucker-Co, Archigram, Superstudio	The 1960s–70s roots of the speculative device in architecture.	See section 4