Collage mirrors the unstable, personal construction of visual perception itself

Evidence

Without the familiar framework of a consistent vanishing point, the eye roams across the scene, dwelling in small details and trying to add it all up. This process forces us to notice our own “construction” of every scene that we perceive as living beings in a living world. In other words, the piece is a collage not so much because Hockney had an aesthetic fondness for collage, but because something like collage is at the heart of the unstable and highly personal process of perception. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 360

Categorization

• DEFINE: The ‘living impression’ — Hockney’s assembled, time-bound way of seeing — shows attention is not passive reception but active construction, directly load-bearing for Odell’s core thesis.
• XREF: Reinforces Odell’s deeper claim that attention is a faculty by which we constitute a world, and pairs with prior chapters on Deep Listening’s figure-ground and participation in the soundscape.