Distributed attention, as opposed to the focused attention of reading and writing, is a type of scanning and wide pattern seeking, most familiar when we look at a painting, watch a movie, search the web or explore a database. Imagine an interface as the scene of a movie. A narrative film’s mise en scene, the meaningful distribution of visual details, is always threatening to distract from the more “important” details of plot and narrative momentum. Image has a power to spill over any kind contained meaning. In more classical film narratives, mise en scene works to synchronize with plot development. The set details might mirror the psychology of a character, for example. In other kinds of cinema, a tension or contrast builds between the visible details distributed on the screen and the plot. Maybe the details begin to a tell a different story than the one the characters are pretending to be involved in. Or the mise en scene introduces many simultaneous narratives that compete for attention. Similarly, page layout or mise en page, can be embedded with disparate, competing information or focus attention on an hierarchy. Interface design, like production design in movies, is an art to control the way attention flows through and around elements. 

The spatial montage that Manovich equates, in his art and writing, to database logic is a form of semantic collage. As soon as two distinct images appear together on a screen, mimetic realism is broken. The surface of engagement may have a kind semiotic realism—the elements may be juxtaposed in a culturally meaningful or referential way—but the illusion of representation is lost.  In spatial montage, screen becomes an interface to a relational set. Like gestalt in interface design, the whole perceived in spatial montage works when a mental model can be made out of bottom-up and top-down processes of attention. 

“In general, spatial montage would involve a number of images, potentially of different sizes and proportions, appearing on the screen at the same time. This by itself of course does not result in montage; it up to the filmmaker to construct a logic which drives which images appear together, when they appear and what kind of relationships they enter with each other.” (Section “Spatial Montage” in The Language of New Media).

The narrative implications of this shift to the multi-paneled interface are great: new ways of representing space, subjectivity, personas and the relationships between identities. Much of this shift can be seen in the best of contemporary graphic novels. In Shaun Tan’s, “The Arrival”,  there is a double-page spread showing images of clouds. In the context of the story, the simple grid makes visible on macro and micro levels, the passage of time, the loneliness of travel, the longing for home, boredom, the change that each day brings. In fact, the associations spill over the narrative container—a man traveling by ship to a new land—as we have the leisure to think of our own experience of passing days. Compared with a single image of the protagonist sitting alone in thought, this image is not only more effective as narrative device, it presents a distributed persona; an affective-expressive identification that is not attached to a single point of view; an identity without a body.