COLLAGE'S NOT DEAD

Collage has always been a political act. The Dadaists would use it to mock the bourgeoisie. Anti-fascist artists used it against nazism. The punk movement made it an aesthetic manifesto. William S. Burroughs turned it into a multimedia compositional technique, arguing that everything could be fragmented and reassembled with new meaning. Even people: Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye's Pandrogyne Project proposed the body itself as a collage, two people cutting and reshaping themselves toward a third, shared identity.

Collage's not dead asked what happens when collage is alive. When it never stops.

Built in TouchDesigner, the piece takes a live camera feed and breaks it apart in real time, fragmenting the image, reorganizing it on a grid, stripping it to black and white, projecting it back out. Viewers become both subject and co-creator. Their movements feeding a generative machine that constantly reinterprets the visible world. The piece raises questions about presence, surveillance, authorship, and the boundaries between analog and digital resistance.

The effect was monstrous. The image remained recognizable enough to understand what it had been, but broken enough to feel wrong. You were not you anymore. A distorted version, fragmented and reassembled, like something had forgotten the steps of how to put you back together.

Shown publicly at a party, installed at the entrance. People interacted more than expected. Some stayed a long time. Some tried to flee.

Collage is not a nostalgic form. It is a living, evolving language. Still urgent, still political, still alive.