The scanning of our active eye movements, either voluntary or involuntary, is generated by expectations already established by habitual processing of known cues within a given environment. Only by patiently looking in a fixed way at local areas of the field does one begin to see its unknown texture, its strangeness. The unfathomable relations of one part of it to another, the uncertainty of how these local elements interact in a dynamic field. When one deliberately moves one’s eyes slightly from one fixed position to another, the shift of an object or area out of the center of vision even to the inner edge of the periphery transforms it. Its color modulated to something less distinct, it loses detail but more importantly becomes something other than what it had just been, and in a new relation to what now occupies the blickpunkt. Perceptual constancy is a phantom, and the world thus seen is no longer identical to itself. It becomes, as Lucretius long ago understood, an infinite cascade of self-differentiation.

-Jonathan Crary, Suspension of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture