The images, which depict home life, familial relationships, celebrations, rituals, vacations, children at play, awkward adolescence and more, are juxtaposed with one another and combined with overlapping spoken word and music in a dreamlike environment of dissolving projected images. The experience conveys the psychological, emotional, and often disturbing nature of photographs and explores their contemporary role in our everyday lives.

The music, composed by Elizabeth Brown for viola, flute, shakuhachi, piano, and toy accordions, incorporates themes and voices that relate to the photographs. References to known melodies resonate much like the familiar themes in the projected images, and musical passages repeat and overlap, echoing the experience of the dissolving projections. Spoken words are drawn from interviews and discussions that Novak and Brown have been conducting since 1996.

Meyer's editing tool offered Novak unprecedented levels of control, since all channels of image and sound are edited in a single integrated environment, on a single time line. Real-time effects are generated live, as the participant watches, rather than being pre-computed and stored on disk beforehand. This translated into a much more flexible system. Novak is taking advantage of this functionality by creating new sequences for the installation with images gathered at collection days during the exhibitions.

COLLECTED VISIONS debuted at The International Center of Photography New York City, November 3 - December 31, 2000 during the inaugural exhibition of the renovated midtown space. It traveled to the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, February - April, 2001 (along with Lorie Novak Photographs 1983-2000), and the Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University, September - October 2001. A video adaption was shown at the MARCO Museum in Monterrey, Mexico in July 2001.