Perception itself is collage-like and never continuous

Evidence

These disjunctures and discrepancies in size undermine any sense of continuity or punctum. 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

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that collage is not a style but the structure of perception — that the world we ‘see’ is assembled from discrete, unstable glimpses — is a genuine paradigm pin, dense enough to sit with for days.
• XREF: Connects to the zero-debibels / soundscape material where ‘figure-ground-field’ structure shows perception as active construction; also to Hockney’s own cubism gloss (‘three noses meant you looked at it three times’). — connects to: Everyday perception reveals things as permanent wholes indifferent to their changing profiles
• ADDENDUM: The ‘construction of every scene’ claim is the perceptual twin of the grafting metaphor — both show that ‘natural’ continuity is actually built, not given.