Daniel Samson

On Friday we had the Collage session with Darren. The aim of the workshop was to produce a series of collages, trying to express one of eight different themes; Composition, Editing, Contrast, Rhythm, Texture, Repurposing, Juxtaposition, Surrealism, Narrative and Humour. Within the workshop we had to choose one of these themes and stick to it. I chose to express narrative, but one of the things we all quickly realised was that it was hard to express one of these without invoking the others to some degree or other.  I found that narrative and rhythm were very related, along with juxtaposition and humour. When it came to the group evaluation it was interesting the diverse opinions on the same collage.

Speed Collages

After finishing our two collages we were then tasked with creating as many collages as we could in 15-20 minutes. My method of creation was to cut out headlines or interesting pieces of text and then place them next to a picture, trying to create some other meaning. I found it quite hard to not worry about what it was creating, as just placing them randomly did not seem very rewarding. At the end of this I had created 8 different collages, some of them turned out well others not so well. But it did make me appreciate the rapid speed of development, I can see it as an interesting spawning ground for future projects at least in the early stages.

At the end of the session we were set the assignment, which is to create 100 collages on the above themes by the end of term. I am currently considering the best method for their creation. I thought it might be interesting exploring the random side of things, so rather than trying hard to create meaning let the meaning come through on its own. One method might be to cut out a large number of pictures and blocks of text as before, then write a number on the back of each. After this is done, create a small program which would randomly select pairs of numbers, then each of them could be created physically. This could be explored further by assigning descriptive tags to each of the collage elements, then the program could only select two pieces based on their tag similarity. With this method you could combine two different sets together to create interesting new meanings. The classification system would have to be researched first however.

All in all an interesting workshop that gets us creating without Photoshop, without the ability to resize, change colour etc. If we want these kind of things we need to think of other ways of doing it. I think that exploration with hands is really important as you can easily get bogged down in small details when the actual idea is poor. I find it especially refreshing as I have worked as a web designer, when doing mood boards for projects it would all be done in Photoshop for speed, but I think there was something missing.