Collection and Collage
It's been a while since I've made a new collage, but collage is very much on my brain. My last finished collage dates back to May, though in June I started a half-dozen or more pieces that are still hanging on my studio wall. Instead of finishing anything new, I've been thinking a lot about how to show finished work, and how to show it that best articulates what's interesting to me about collage.
Looking through my blog, I've written around a dozen posts where I've shared a selection of the old letters, books, documents, etc. that I've found and have used or plan on using in my collage work. I've always been a magpie for old paper, but the more time I spend with it, I realise that I'm actually a magpie for the stories in the old papers. I don't want to use them without knowing where they came from, and what they once meant. These papers, some of them over a hundred years old, exist today because they were once important to someone. Granted, the fact that I have them now also means that they're no longer important to their previous owners, but importance can be transferred - at least that's what I'd like to believe. While I'm not researching these documents with the same rigor as an academic, but I'm finding out what I can and engaging with my sources as more than simply formal elements - shapes, colors, textures, etc. These papers, books, etc. contain multitudes and the more facets I can share, the more interesting the work becomes.
Which brings me here, to a first draft of an interactive collage exhibition.
What's here is truly a first draft. I'm only showing four collages, and I'm only looking at one source that's shared between them. It's essentially an interactive webpage & I took a few detours getting here. Originally I imagined that I could build an exhibition in D3, a Javascript library used for data visualisation. There's a lot of very good data vis being done, particularly in online journalism and I'd like to play in that sandbox, but the amount of learning I'd need to get up to speed is considerable. D3.js lays on the backburner, to be reconsidered lately. My next foray was into Unity, a game engine tool. Unity excels at building interactive experiences and in an ideal world, this exhibition would be clickable, scrollable, manipulatable, all that. Unity can absolutely that, but again, I'm starting nearly from scratch with it. While there are a lot of learning resources available, it feels like I'm a lot of work away from having anything worth showing.
Enter Figma.
Figma is everywhere. It's used for UI/UX development, brainstorming, collaboration, product building, website & editorial layout, and many other applications. It's easy to get up to speed with and is extremely flexible. So here we are.
My original vision for this project was a space displaying several finished collages. For each collage I would photograph and document every source element, both in metadata (tags, labels, etc.), and in writing, with links to external websites, explanations of provenance, and so on. Clicking on any one collage would open an exploded view, showing each element - both in its original incarnation and in its manipulated form as used in the collage. For example, if an element is part of a book page, the viewer could see both the cropped and full page, and learn about the source book, who wrote it, when, its subject, etc. Then if other collages use pages from the same book, they would be linked and the viewer could call each of them up and see them in their shared context. Essentially every collage would be a collection of linked images, and all of the links could be explored in any direction - to their source, to other collages, and outside the collection to related documents/sites/etc. In a further step, viewers could move the elements around inside the exhibition space, creating new collages, which would of course be linked like all of the others.
This draft falls short of all that, but I'm interested with what I've come up with. It functions now as more of a visual essay with some interactive elements, but it does function, and functions well enough that I think it's worth thinking about the next one. As noted, in this draft I only documented one collage source. Moving forward I plan to do more documentation at the outset, photographing sources, researching them, and building a connected library of assets. With that in hand I can then increase the amount of interactivity in the webpage (or wherever the next version winds up), and see where that takes me.
To view the page, expand the embedded window below by clicking the icon in the top right corner.
It’s best viewed in a laptop or desktop browser.