Distributed Attention
Distributed attention is a type of attention that involves scanning, global processing and wide pattern seeking. The eyes scan a spatial field, selects details and sends the data to the visual cortex to process and order into conceptual wholes. But distributed attention is really an oscillation between different sites of focused attention. Unlike the consistent focused attention required to follow the linear path of a sentence, scanning a spatial environment breaks visual data into small chunks of information.
In classical film narratives, mise en scene works to synchronize with plot development. Costume, set details, lighting or weather might mirror the psychology of a character, for example. But the distribution of visual details, even in a classical narrative film, is always threatening to distract from the more “important” and hierarchical details of plot and narrative momentum. Image has a power to spill over any kind contained meaning. In non-classical and non-mimetic forms of cinema, this tension between image and narrative meaning or "plot" is part of an affective strategy that destabilizes the viewer's "understanding" of the visual field. Perhaps the details in mise en scene 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 either a collage of disparate, competing elements or a delineated hierarchy of elements. Interface design, like production design in movies, is an affective art to guide attention as it flows through and around elements on a screen. The shift from mimetic screen to multi-paneled interface, a shift that Manovich associates with database logic, introduces new narrative techniques, new ways of representing space and subjectivity.
The spatial montage that Manovich equates, in his art and writing,with 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, the 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).
Drucker - Graphic Devices. The narrative role of everything besides the images, text, sound and video. The gutters, borders, white-space. The structures that hold together the content.
Chris Ware's graphic novel...
Drucker Graphic Devices -
"Subjective Meteorology"
"Imaged images - by which presenting many images simultaneously within a single optical act, calls for a visual self engaged in a mode of parallel rather than serial seeing. The result is a form of visual polyphony with sampled images as voices whose influence extends across contemporary design aesthetics as well as informatic imagery….linked narratives can be run and interpreted simultaneously." - Brian Rotman
| Previous page on path | Plotting the Database, page 4 of 7 | Next page on path |
Discussion of "Distributed Attention"
Add your voice to this discussion.
Checking your signed in status ...