Discover the Best Books Written by Jenny Odell

Jenny Odell is an American multidisciplinary artist, writer, and educator based in Oakland, California. She has taught Internet art and digital/physical design at Stanford University since 2013. She wrote The New York Times best-selling book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019). Odell was born in San Francisco and grew up in Cupertino, California. She graduated from UC Berkeley in 2008 with a degree in English Literature and received her MFA in Design + Technology from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010.

Odell's work consists of acts of close observations such as bird watching, collecting screenshots, or trying to parse bizarre forms of e-commerce. Many of her artistic projects re-use existing objects or images and put them in context, for example, images from Google Earth and Google Maps. Odell has described where this approach comes from; I often say that the medium is context Part of the reason I work this way is that I find existing things infinitely more interesting than anything I could possibly make.

In 2015, Odell was artist-in-residence at Recology SF, otherwise known as the San Francisco dump. The residency culminated in an exhibition of her work: The Bureau of Suspended Objects, a detailed archive of objects scavenged and selected at the dump. Odell conducted in-depth research into each object's manufacturing, distribution, popularity, and use. Much of her art exists within and pulls from the Internet; this is no exception. The archive is accessible online, and much of the content is pulled from the internet, such as Google street views of manufacturing plants and videos of commercials for products. 

The detailed history is meant to bring attention to resources involved in both the products' production and consumption. Neo-Surreal is a collection of work completed while Odell was artist-in-residence at the Internet Archive in 2017. While there, she came across a large collection of BYTE, an American computing magazine, from the 1980s. She pulled images from this archive and edited and curated them in a way to highlight the surreal nature of the industry, both then and today. In her own words,

The reconfiguration of this material highlights the ways in which such imagery, viewed in hindsight, inadvertently portrays some of the stranger and more sinister aspects that technology eventually came to embody. For instance, one finds things like a computer wearing a policeman's hat and wielding a riding crop (evoking surveillance) or a pill opening to reveal a computer chip (evoking biometrics). Similarly to Richard Prince in his Cowboys series, I've done nothing here except remove the text, restore some backgrounds, and re-title the images.

Odell's book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019) discusses "how to disconnect from the attention economy." The book builds on the topics that had already surfaced in her previous artistic work: our relationship to technology and how observation can be a critical action. She explains how doing nothing can be a strategy to resist the profit-driven technology which attempts to hold our attention at all costs. 

Odell says doing nothing can be a refusal to take part in life online and instead re-engage with your physical surroundings. Jonah Bromwich praised the book in a review published by The New York Times: " She constructs a complex, smart and ambitious book that at first reads like a self-help manual, then blossoms into a wide-ranging political manifesto." Ultimately, the book is a criticism of capitalism, an argument against our standard definitions of productivity, and an encouragement to re-engage with nature and local communities.