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, always threatens 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 nonmimetic 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 window on the world to spatial montage, a shift that Manovich equates, in his art and writing, with database logic, introduces new ways of conceiving relational aspects space, time, eventness and subjectivity.

Spatial montage 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 presence 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.