DISPERSIONS: The Phenomena of Scattered Attention

For its 22nd edition, the 25 FPS Festival announces a new program – a two-day seminar program titled DISPERSIONS: The Phenomena of Scattered Attention, conceived as a space for meeting, discussion and exchange, inviting participants to share their experiences and reflect on the changing modes of spectatorship in audiovisual arts and contemporary culture. The seminar will be held on September 21 & 22, 2026 at Surogat Kino (Kulturno-informativni centar) in Zagreb, ahead of the Festival program, which runs from September 22 – 26.

The particular issue of attention has long shaped discussions surrounding film, art, culture and reception theory, but it has taken on a new sense of urgency, in an age of omnipresent screens, streaming platforms, and many digital interfaces. The aim is to explore the consequences of the increasingly fragmented modes of watching as well as to take consider the notions of ‘scattered’ and ‘dispersed’ attention that have become more common.

How do we watch films when our viewing experiences has now been split between cinemas, laptops, our phones and multiple screens? What has happened to immersion and the communal experience of spectatorship when our attention is constanly interrupted, redirected or dispersed? And is there something cinema – experimental and art cinema in particular – still can offer as alternative models of watching, thinking and sustaining attention?

Framed by the question of how we perceive moving images today, the DISPERSION will bring together lectures, discussions, film programs, and a workshop to open up a space for reflecting on attention as an aesthetic, technological, social and political phenomenon. The seminar will focus in particular on the relationship between experimental and art cinema, digital culture and contemporary viewing habits, while also addressing the broader conditions under which images are produced and circulated, and the ways in which they catch, direct or lose our attention.

We are happy to announce a few guests confirmed to take part in the seminar: film historian, curator and lecturer Federico Windhausen, an esteemed international scholar of experimental cinema and the editor of A Companion to Experimental Cinema (which will be published in Croatian translation, as part of the Kvadrati sekunde series); Julian Hanich, an Assistant Professor of film studies at the University of Groningen, whose areas of expertise include film aesthetics, cinematic emotions, film phenomenology and the collective cinema experience; Max Bergmann, researcher and art director of Vienna Shorts, whose interests are non-linear narration, digital film and online culture; Hana Samražija, literary and film critic, political epistemologist and translator, who will discuss the issues of attention, violence and mediated images.

The film programming will feature three curated selections dealing with attention from different angles. Digital Attention Loops, to be presented by Vienna Shorts, puts focus on the circulation of images and the attention economy in network culture. The Attention as Action program, by Sarajevo Film Festival, explores attention as an active practice of watching and remembering, of resistance, escape and emotional engagement. Dispersions, a program by 25 FPS, is a selection of experimental films addressing the instability of attention: attention that is redirected, disrupted, scattered, held, or transformed into a different kind of perception.

The seminar will also include a workshop led by Barbara Matijević, a theatre artist whose work engages with digital culture, online phenomena and ways in which the body, performance and social imagination are shaped by contemporary technologies.

The seminar is primarly aimed at students of film, arts, the humanities and other related fields, as well as anyone interested in deepening their understanding of contemporary moving images, meeting colleagues from different areas of research, and taking part in an open dialogue with our lecturers, artists and Festival guests.

The participants selected for the seminar will be provided with accommodation for the Festival program from September 22 – 26.

Students interested in the participation in the seminar and the Festival need to apply by June 5, 2026 via the following link.