The Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Technology hosts a monthly research seminar as an open forum for discussion, welcoming all interested participants. In November, we will be joined by Heloisa Oss Boll (Amsterdam UMC) for a talk on "Attention Matrices, Attentive Flowers.
- Date
- Tuesday 10 Nov 2026, 14:45 - 17:00
- Type
- Lecture
- Spoken Language
- English
- Room
- Polak 3-09
- Ticket information
The event is free and open to all, no registration required. If you have any questions, please do get in touch with us at sturmer@esphil.eur.nl
As you read this text, you are paying attention. We usually understand attention as a cognitive faculty, as what localizes a lived experience of time and space. Coincidentally (or not), the core mechanism of Large Language Models (LLMs), now used daily and globally, is also called attention. This talk examines that encounter.
Thinking with Lyotard's Les Immatériaux (1985), Bernard Stiegler, and Yuk Hui, we will ask: What becomes of attention when industrial apparatuses capture it? How is machinic attention actually computed? And what other possible futures open if we understand and ground these technologies differently, as pharmaka?
As perspectives, we will explore attention as persistence and tension: not resisting the technological condition, but curating it. Some hints: a student asleep in class (Deleuze), a flower blooming in my garden.
Heloisa Oss Boll is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam and Amsterdam UMC, where she works on clinical AI using graphs and large language models (LLMs) for predicting patient outcomes. Her interdisciplinary background spans biotechnology, computer science, and a longstanding engagement with ontology and the philosophy of technology, particularly technics and time.
