Arts Writers is a new collaborative initiative between Glasgow International, Glasgow School of Art and The List, which sees students from the Glasgow School of Art's Master of Letters in Art Writing programme write features and reviews about works at this year's Glasgow International. The writers and critics will receive mentorship and publication via The List. The next work in this series is a feature on Aideen Doran's Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking by Siuán NiDhochartaigh.

Arts events have changed during the pandemic. Digital frameworks contextualise our engagement. While 'Attention' was the designated theme of Glasgow International for 2020, its postponement means this theme has taken on a new relevance during the pandemic. Rules around gathering have meant the frames of visibility have shifted, usually to an online space. The aesthetics of work and artworks have changed during the work-from-home era. Talks and performances mediated through Zoom expose previously concealed sites of production. As we consider these impacts on attention, and the digital as a marketplace for the attention economy, Glasgow International's online programme has a unique opportunity to self-reflect on the impacts on attention and technology.

'Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking' is the title of Aideen Doran's work. In it, fragments of Karen Brodine's poetry collection of the same title is read aloud. Different voices speak in isolation or chorus, iterating and reiterating Brodine's evocative text which deals with the politics of work. Sounds of office machinery are slowed to pulsate and form rhythmic haunting beats. James Clegg's essay provides us the viewer with some context, particularly in relation to Brodine's socialist and feminist text. Brodine's subject matter was her own role as a typesetter in the late '70s and early '80s in a previously white, male, and outwardly heterosexual working environment. As companies diversified (with the aim of exploiting non-unionised female, particularly Black female, employees) it fuelled a new kind of identity politics. While this environment gave visibility to women and other minority groups in the workplace, it was built upon their exploitation.

Doran's form is simple. In many ways it is an act of translation, and forms its own line of production between Doran and Brodine. It renders text into recording, bringing them into a new technological realm. There is a contrast between conceptually loaded yet simple processes in Doran's piece that relate to Brodine's subject matter. Brodine's 'Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking' explores the juxtaposition of repetitive and banal processes and the liberated mind, representing the subjectivity of the worker, that is difficult to control. A line of poetry Doran chooses to repeat is 'They cannot stop her from doing this thinking'. Despite using Brodine's poetry so directly, the conclusions of these working relationships are vastly different in Doran's work.

Doran's form directly subverts Brodine's and situates it within a different context. Brodine's poetic texts are related to her labour, as are the subjectivities it produces. The reader is still, while eyes move interpreting the text, and the mind is free. In contrast, Doran's subject is liberated to a different extent. The sound file is installed in Trongate, but exists digitally. It can be consumed on your commute, as you exercise, or in the comfort of your home. However, the sound file occupies the mind in a different way than reading does. The listener thinks in pace with this durational work. It brings many relevant issues to the fore about how work and technology affect subjectivity differently. It works overtime, long after the soundscape is over to characterise a unique moment in our engagement with creative practice, work, and the self.

Doran's questioning of new subjectivities in this technological era is needed. Over the pandemic there's been a new vocabulary to describe our lapsed attention spans, digital exhaustion and burn out. Perhaps it's because the technologies of labour mirror so closely the technologies of rest. Unlike the paradoxes presented in Brodine's work, what we think and consume directly feeds into capitalist production. New technologies, such as data harvesting, means that our attention is a form of production. Body and screen has become the extended technology of attention for socialising, labour and creative practices. Doran recognises that this should be situated within the feminist discourse she identifies in Brodine's practice.

As I write this, an archive opens up of essays, sound files, poetry. The working relationships between them are digital and personal, mechanical and feminist. Doran presents another hybrid between historical and contemporary conditions. This backward-facing analysis of the present is a theme echoed in other works in the festival. Duncan Campbell revisits Samuel Beckett. Christian Noelle Charles revisits her own work. Other works simply state their limits, and how their original plans have changed because of the pandemic. Generally there is a withdrawal from making something new. Instead artists are presenting the paradoxes of cultural production. Attention has been postponed.

Aideen Doran's 'Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking' is currently being displayed as part of the exhibition Songs for Work, available to view at Glasgow Project Space until Sun 27 June.