Cut-Ups

This practical coursework was primarily about working with experimental and visual composition techniques. The main interest was in visually bringing together and rearranging the supposedly incompatible. After an introduction to digital image processing and montage techniques, the participants used computers to develop a series of collages, based on unconventional rearrangement of found photographic image fragments, which were taken from various photographs of landscapes and architecture and subsequently combined in new ways. The main focus was on bringing together contradictory and conflicting fragments of image content. For example, complementary landscape fragments were interwoven, different views of spaces were interlaced, fragments of outdoor spaces were placed in an indoor context and vice versa, or architectural elements were joined together in ways that seemed contradictory. Another interesting aspect was the creation of illusionistic perspective views, for instance by combining parts of several photographs from different viewing angles in a central projection and within the same image. In all visual interventions, the aim was to implement the photographic visual language as consistently as possible, which meant taking into account consistent perspective and lighting design across the images, as well as coordinating the individual image fragments and adapting them to each other with regard to brightness, contrast, colour, saturation, graininess and focus. The aim was to create visual constructs that have little to do with reality: utopias (in terms of content) that appear strangely real because of their consistent photographic mode of representation, but at the same time fundamentally question the claim to reality asserted by seemingly photographic depictions.