COLLAGE NOT DEAD

Collage Not Dead is the culminating piece in a series of explorations into collage as both a medium and a methodology. Traditionally tied to analog protest, collage has long served as a tool of disruption, recombination, and subversion. This installation reclaims that spirit within a digital framework, presenting a constantly shifting visual composition that responds to its environment in real time.

At its core, the piece uses a webcam to capture live footage of its surroundings, which is then segmented and shuffled using a custom TouchDesigner system. The image remains recognizable, but is endlessly rearranged—fragmented and reconstructed in real time. Viewers become both subject and co-creator, their movements and objects feeding a generative machine that constantly reinterprets the visible world.

By anchoring the work in interactivity and impermanence, Collage Not Dead poses questions about presence, surveillance, authorship, and the boundaries between analog and digital resistance. Its title, a nod to punk’s iconic declaration of persistence, positions collage not as a nostalgic form, but as a living, evolving language. Still urgent, still political, still alive.