Collage and digital media

In her essay "The Invention of Collage," Marjorie Perloff loosely defines collage as the "transfer of materials from one context to another, even as the original context cannot be erased." Discussing Futurist collage at length, she comments that "[the Futurists] reconcieved collage as propaganda art, an art that directly bombards the senses," presenting an "intellectual challenge to the viewer [and raising] the issue of code and message." On the other hand, she characterizes Picasso's collage works as striving to unify diverse sources under a single meaning - essentially, as extended metaphor.

What use do these concepts have for work in time-based arts, for film and digital video? Non-digital formats can most definitely partake of Perloff's idea of collage; the physical nature of analog media (i.e. optical printing, etc.) will always leave a trace of the original source. Digital works, however, unify different types of media - using current technology, almost any audio-visual media can be easily digitized and combined/remixed with any other media. As much as the "edges" of different media formats might be seen within a digital "collage," they are all essentially composed of the same materials (that is, 1s and 0s). Digital artists striving for a "collage" aesthetic must, in a way, actively seek to have the different sources they work with not cohere exactly and seamlessly - essentially, they must strive for imperfection. Does this preserve the original context, as Perloff stipulates? As digital media allow for an infinite number of exact reproductions, the original context may become lost or obscured, or buried within a single, unified aesthetic. In this way, digital "collage" works might be much closer to Picasso's sense of collage - one in which the individual parts give rise to a distinct, individual meaning only on very close inspection.

This is not to say that the Futurist conception of "propaganda" collage is not something that cannot be recreated in a digital form; the sort of "verbal-visual overkill" that Perloff sees in Futurist collage is something I often attempt in my own video work.