Whereas, in the empty space of attention, light follows its own law, contemporaneity is governed by an economy of attention in which informational light, structured by the logistics of perception, conditions consciousness in a spectacle of algorithmic mediation. Attention, as the site of the possibility of a clearing in which illumination appears of its own accord, is a space of vulnerability. Whereas phōtagōgia cultivated an open, receptive state of attention—precisely because it can be opened dimensionally—attention can also be flattened into a mono-dimensionality devoid of resonant interiority.

The human, as filter and cave—as world splitter—mediates light at the interface of attention. The light that we mediate is dual-aspect: mental and physical, hence its pharmakological character both to blind and to reveal. The mesmeric screenification of perception and the large-scale optics that militarize the play of light foreclose light’s ontology, necessitating a return to the methods of phōtagōgia—not a redoubling of the programmatics of the digital spectacle. This return would be an intuitive ‘tuning’—beyond the geometrization of perspective, it would gesture toward an embodied, resonant encounter with luminosity in the open space of attention—one that dimensionalizes not according to the constraints of space-time, but toward that prior non-dual non-space at the heart of the psycho-physical.