Collage: Binary

What I appreciated, yet found most difficult about this assignment is how it required me to really look inside and ask how I am represented in the world and how I wanted to present myself. In doing so, I really began to think about how I’m designed and about how I interact with the world’s design.

In thinking about the design of my collage I turned to thoughts by Pierre Joris where he described collage as lifting elements from other works that are unrelated and creating something new. As Ulmer mentioned collage is transferring materials from one context to another. I thought about how so much of my life and career is founded in that very statement. Capturing reality in the form of pictures, video and audio recordings does move them from one context to another, from the context of reality to simulation and reproduction.

I started with a base photo of myself and sought capture the binary nature of my brain in its pursuit to convert the physical beauty of nature and music and convert it into the digital world of reproduction. I thought about the constant struggle between my left and right brain and the dual personalities it takes on. This evolved into Binary depicting two very different sides of my life. One where I love exploring, seeing and hearing the world and one where I love converting them into media through the systems of mechanical reproduction. The camera lens and speaker represent the tools of conversion I use which become electronic images and sound waves. The natural world is a space of depth, color and beauty. The space of electronic reproduction is flat, calculated and mechanical.

Binary is a collection of unrelated images designed to communicate the binary nature of my thoughts and the binary nature of the world created by the conversion of the physical into the mechanical through media design.