Originally, this collaboration began with the pleasing realisation that the vocabularies of poetics and code overlapped significantly; pointing at times to companionable and at times different compositional, spatial, philosophical and practical functions. The potential for the language of poetics and the language of code to work productively and generatively into their differences and sameness, repetitions and dead-ends, was great.

More importantly, we shared a crucial idea: that without engaged attention, without interaction, without invested play, interrogation and investigation, there is no experience of the world and its things. To think and to play – to think about thinking and to play with play – are central to our engagement with and understanding of the world. It is an ongoing, almost unintelligible process; subject to change and chance. When we are attentive to our negotiation with these processes, we realise that we are continually producing and collaborating with the materials of experience.

The three works in this collection ‘happen’ when they are touched, moved and played with. A poem ‘happens’ when it is read, when its language is performed in the event of reading or listening. We invite everyone to tune their attention, to make it ‘happen’.

Geometries of Attention is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts’ Emerging Writers/Illustrators Initiative.

Many thanks and acknowledgments to Ernst and Marianne Christen for their invaluable help, and a big thank you to Tom Smith for assistance in recording the sound files. With much love and appreciation for the Serial Space Gallery and its directors.