When I first heard that the topic for the first project was appropriation, my first thought – from which I never really deviated – was to concentrate on the mash-up. A mash-up is simply a combination of two or more musical tracks, a concept first introduced by hip-hop dj’s. Most mash-ups attempt to synchronize songs from dissimilar genres (usually a hip-hop track with something else, although any pairing could be made), juxtaposing the songs and blending their inherent connotations to create a unique new track. I was particularly interested in exploring the music produced by electronic musician and DJ Girl Talk, who weaves hundreds of samples from all reaches of pop music into an elaborate tapestry of sound in his albums. Like other mash-up artists, Girl Talk creates often-unexpected combinations of samples and their associations within his music (such as Simon and Garfunkel with Li’l Jon). However, because Girl Talk uses such a large number samples arranged in a continuous flow, the listener is in a constant flux of emotional and cognitive responses, the experience of which is more overwhelming, exhilarating, and often humorous than simpler mashes tend to be. I was also fascinated by his unique ability to convert popular artists into sonic textures, using them as if they were colors in a palate to “paint” a track—they were small, ephemeral elements of the larger structure instead of the central structure of the song itself. Herein, Girl Talk firmly reestablishes the power of the celebrity voice, demoting them to the “instruments” of the music and promoting himself, the arranger, to the role of the artist.
I wanted to explore these ideas, as well as the overall ability to make new meaning from a wide range of pop-cultural sources, within the visual realm. I immediately thought that a collage would be an analogous form to a mash-up, because it combines appropriated images within the same picture in the same way that one hears multiple samples played over one another. I thought animating the collage digitally would allow the combinations of images to flow more freely than a static collage would; I also thought the animation would allow me more opportunities to modify the images and make them seem humorous. These ideas established, I decided I would set my animated collage to a Girl Talk song, which would make the connection to mash-ups, particularly those by Girl Talk, as clear as possible.
Having done a fair amount of collage-making in the past, I had a number of pre-cut figures and backgrounds that I thought I could use to make my animated collages. This established that the majority of my source material would be from physical sources instead of digital ones; I scanned the magazine clippings and modified them in Photoshop to combine them into collages and layer them to eventually be animated. I wanted to focus on combining unlike sources into the series of collages, so I used several magazines of differing genres to cut apart and scan: these included Vogue, Seventeen, Us, Sports Illustrated, National Geographic, and the tabloid World. I also used digital versions of several magazines that I couldn’t find, including Time Magazine, the Economist, Tiger Beat, and Good Housekeeping. I thought all of these magazines would offer a wide breadth of images that had very specific and very different connotations.
As I played with images, I was almost overwhelmed by the multitude of ways I could combine images and the ways I could animate these combinations. I found myself becoming more and more interested in the elements of pop-cultural magazines themselves, instead of simply using the collage medium to draw a connection to musical mash-ups. Like Girl Talk combines his musical samples, I wanted to use familiar characters (celebrities) or types of figures (athletes; models), arranging them and distorting them to make them seem flashy, absurd, or humorous. I wanted to use these arrangements to offer a critique of the information we see in magazines, particularly emphasizing its theatricality with the combinations of images I chose. I also wanted to explore the physicality of the images I was using, including elements such as their translucency and their flip sides. As I was exploring the programs I used to animate my collages, I felt constrained by the ability to animate in the way I really wanted, particularly because of my inexperience and the quality of many of the images. Although basically animating layers within a Photoshop file was time-consuming, making more fluid motions in Flash was much more challenging. I needed to find specific types of figures that had limbs that could be easily separated from the bodies, which were often hard to come by.
I believe I could have managed my working progress more effectively. I initially cut out a great number of figures, backgrounds and phrases, after which I combined them into interesting collages in Photoshop. I cut apart the figures and compositions and placed the moveable parts into different layers to be animated. After I began animating, I got more and more ideas about what sort of imagery I could use and animate. So I continued cutting images and assembling collages as I was in the process of animating, which may have impeded my ability to refine the animations I already had. Had I managed my time better, I could perhaps have created more of the complex Flash animations and made a more interesting overall project. Had I better planned out the combinations and images I intended to create beforehand, I might have spent less time searching for new ideas during later stages of the process.
Objectively speaking, the end product effectively complemented the Girl Talk track I selected, and thus shared many of the music’s ideas. The music track involves choppy snippets of sound, as if the listener was flipping quickly through channels; in a parallel fashion, the video involved quick flashes of images, often moving frantically. Many of the individual collages within the video involve jerkily-animated combinations of figures and shapes, often from noticeably different – even contradictory – sources. Such combinations, like the gangster-dressed man with the high-heeled shoes, seem humorous and strange as they move together. However, many of the images which involve a combination of images from unlike sources may flash too fast to be understood as contradictory, humorous, or critical in any respect. The frantic flashing of images that involve strange or jarring juxtapositions, such as the image of the face with the missing mouth and eyes, were able to successfully abstract and ridicule the collage medium. This message would have been more fully and humorously conveyed had the dissimilar, combined collages been easier to view.
All in all, the project involved intensive labor, both within and outside of the digital realm, as well as careful consideration and assemblage. The result was eye-catching and powerful, generally conveying the ideas of a mash-up I initially intended to confront. It could have been better planned so that more central ideas could have been more successfully conveyed. Considering these successes and shortcomings, I believe I deserve an A- or a B+ on this project.