In response to a post I made over at Clicks & Notes, "N" sent me this link:
The Conceptual Space of Collage
Collage is a critical paradigm of the information age because it opens the range of possibilities through which we interpret information artifacts. Cut and paste enables semiotic construction that simultaneously leverages and detourns the means of production embodied by particular media elements. The recombination of genetic codes of meaning creates hybrid forms. Through these cross-currents, culture, and even knowledge, evolve.
Of course, with my weekly mood boards, I've been getting into the whole collage thing a lot lately. Sure I could just stick with a textual laundry list of things that I've been seeing/hearing/reading/doing/thinking all week, but the mood boards just feel (to me) like they capture it all so much better...
Anyway, the article above talks about some sort of application called "CollageMachine", which unfortunately seems to be no longer available online. So, I did some hunting around and turned up some other online collage applications:
- National Gallery of Art NGAkids collage machine -- choose from various shapes and pictures; you can flip things around, resize elements and adjust their transparency; or if you're feeling lazy, just click the "Auto" button and it'll generate a collage for you; very neat
- Collage Machine 1.0 -- a few different galleries of images to choose from; you can rotate and cut pieces, as well as add your own scribbles with the mouse
- typoGenerator -- I've linked to this one before; not so much interactivity here, but the results are very cool
I also got to thinking about a few online news sites that rely heavily on a collage effect to transmit many news items in a visual way:
- Yahoo! Buzz Images and News -- splays out a bunch of photos for you; mouse over them to get the textual summary
- 10 x 10 -- 100 keywords and 100 pictures
- newsmap -- no pictures, but relies on size and placement of textual elements to convey importance or magnitude of coverage
Are we going to rely more on interfaces like this to cope with information overload? When are we going to get RSS aggregators that look this?
Slightly off-topic -- but also very neat -- are these visual works that reprocess other visual information (found via swens blog):
- MTV's 10 Greatest Music Videos of All Time, as manipulated by Jason Salavon -- "Each of the videos in the top 10 of this list were digitized in their entirety. The individual frames from each video were then simplified to their mean average color, eliminating overt content. These solid-colored squares were then rearranged in their original sequence and are read left-to-right, top-to-bottom."
- 50 people see... -- blends together different photo images from Flickr that all bear the same tag