This post follows up on the previous post.
This recent Artforum article (free registration required) primarily discusses the growth of collage in a digital age, and its response to economic turmoil, but the author veers into McLuhan territory, and some of what he has to say could also apply to tumult caused by the introduction of new media:
...The manner in which collage can make meaning—in an atmosphere now dense in remixes, mash-ups, and shuffles—will be very different than it was in times of crisis past. Today, collage must confront its status as a form that has risen rapidly in postwar popular culture, making it a natural impulse for all media. It is not only a common response to the layers of information that burden us but also an invisible force that reorganizes histories, logs, and lineages to be more readily accessible—now an everyday necessity. I would like to take collage’s recent resurgence in art as an occasion to revisit and update its related popular histories—a shifting story, one that hovers at the fluid seam of art, politics, technology, and mass media.
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FOLLOWING THE LATE 1960s, the collage impulse became increasingly dominant in popular media as segments of information began to get smaller, faster, more readily transferable, and ultimately less linear. Beginning with the Children’s Television Workshop’s heavily research-driven programming, which introduced Sesame Street in 1969, and ending with the launch of Shawn Fanning’s peer-to-peer website, Napster, in 1999, we might reconsider the late-twentieth-century history of collage as a consumer-as-creator genealogy.
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IN 1931, [Raoul] HAUSMANN HAD CLAIMED that photomontage could create “the most striking contrasts, to the achievement of perfect states of equilibrium.” By 2001, this equilibrium had reached a global scale through the trafficking of billions of digitized images: the hyperplastic descendants of the rigid cut-and-paste fragments from an earlier moment of collage.
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