Intentionally misaligned camera grids trick viewers into looking closely at every panel.

Evidence

In 2012, after experimenting with early Macintosh computers, fax machines, and the earliest version of Photoshop, Hockney found yet another way to “make the picture.” He mounted twelve cameras to the side of a car and drove slowly down different country roads in Yorkshire, near where he grew up. Each piece in Seven Yorkshire Landscapes is displayed as a three-by-six grid of screens displayed edge to edge. Because the field of view and zoom level of each camera is intentionally misaligned, the effect is like that of a kaleidoscopic, almost hallucinatory Google Street View. Like Pearblossom Highway, the slight disconnection between individual “pictures” tricks our eyes into looking closely, suggesting that there is something to be seen in every panel—and indeed there is. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 362

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why does spatial or temporal disconnection force closer looking rather than mere confusion? The mechanism Odell gestures at could be worth unpacking.
• XREF: connects to: Eccentric camerawork can shift attention to marginal details — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 385
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Eccentric camerawork can shift attention to marginal details — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 385