Ellen Norrish

Sorry everyone but i feel like this is going to be a HUGE post as i haven't posted in the last 2 weeks.

So I have been looking at the relationship between analog collage and digital collage. (By analog I mean you're manual cut&paste collaging). I'm very interested in collage and have recently noticed a general wankyness associated with analog. i.e. artists advertise on their website that they are strictly 100% analog. So I've decided to spend the semester looking at both ways of practising collage, exploring the tensions between them and defining the middle ground by combining the two.

So far my research has told me that in the eyes of the many analog collage artists, digital collage is a form of cheating. Much like any kind of analog vs. digital friction (think of vinyl vs. serato dj mixing, film cameras vs digital cameras). These analog artists see digital collage as cheating because the technology does a lot of the hard work for them. As much as i love getting messy with glue, digital collage is much more time efficient - especially if the collage is only the first part of a screen printing process. I'm going to try use them both this semester.

Here are some quick examples of analog collage artists i've been looking at:

Alejandro Chavetta - http://cargocollective.com/chavetta

Mario Wagner - http://www.mario-wagner.com/

Jelle Martens - http://www.jellemartens.be/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/jellemartens/

Randi Antonsen - http://www.randiantonsen.com/

Virginia Echeverria - http://www.flickr.com/photos/virginiaecheverria/

And here are some examples of Digital collage from a book called Cut Paste Collective http://bnn-international.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/cut-paste-collective-digital-x-analog.html

I found this books pages as a really great example of digital collage as it goes through (sadly in japanese) how the various artists have composed the artwork using Photoshop or Illustration CS with the designated motifs given by the book's editors.

I also found a great video by artist Celio Braga which in my opinion embodies a balance between traditional and new media

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdD7e27LH44

Anyway this is a snippet of my research - will hopefully be able to post some of my own collages next