The Emergency Was Curiosity is an illustrated book report, exhibition, and event series inspired by Jenny Odell’s 2019 book How To Do Nothing. The project explores how we can cultivate individual and collective creative attention.

Producer and writer Christie George originally developed The Emergency Was Curiosity as a personal creative response — a way of remixing Odell’s ideas through hand-drawn illustrations, collages, watercolors, and essays about the ways these ideas became more relevant during the pandemic.

The project became so much more than that, chronicling Christie's move out of a city to a small town in northern California with her family, highlighting the quirks and glories of rural living and sharing her experiments (both successful and inane) in cultivating her own attention.

It has since evolved into something like a group project — an exhibition with installations to help people exercise their attention and an event series (bird watching! potlucks! silent book club!) to help people do nothing…together.

Ultimately, the project illuminates how practices of attention can help us better understand ourselves and each other.