Digital Collage: What is it?
Digital Art and Research Processes
Regarding her artmaking process, Alana says:
“I started making art collage in 1976, after a drawing took 6 months to finish. Now, digital technology allows me to work almost as fast as my brain can imagine. My techniques developed as technology did. At first, “compositing” was only prints on paper, sized up and down on zerox machines and glued to each other. Now it is digital, some created by AI, others collaged on a tablet and, eventually, merged in film. Each digital technology is chosen according to the task at hand.
Current tools include:
- Procreate for collaging multiple digital images to tell the story of their lives, and for merging those with abstract feelings. It is also very useful for re-imagining images and layouts quickly
- ChatGBT is my AI colleague, and I experiment with how it translates philosophical ideas, and the metadata from imagery, into abstraction.
- DaVinci Resolve is used to build the VFX animations of the relationships between the other two
Because it is digital, the work can be any size, but because the ideas I work with are big, powerful and strong; the work needs to be as well.
Digital art can be inherently sustainable because nothing needs to be produced until someone wants to put it on their wall. Projection led naturally to VFX and film, playing with how images can morph one to another.
Regarding her Research Process…
Action Research became Alana’s research methodology of choice, during her doctoral work at Columbia University in 2000, primarily because of its participatory flexibility in structure. Life is messy, frequently and the stages of the research overlap.
Alana says:
“All research methodology inherently measures the past, and this is a problem for situations where people want to build something new. Because of the rounds of research cycles, Action Research (which has been called by many names) measures situations closer to when they happen and this allows participants to plan and execute for a new future, measuring the steps of evolution as it emerges.”