Online Studio Space Turns The Internet Into A Collage

via Terrell Davis

Though many of us spent our high school art classes meticulously assembling, cutting, pasting, and photo-transferring images, when tumblr was invented it created a brand new (and shareable space) where a similar endless stream of idiosyncratic images could be found. Only on tumblr there is no way to collage, only to compile--each reblogged post is always trailed with notes, likes, and links back to the original source. Though tumblr remains a lucrative social media blogging platform for collecting and sharing, without original content one's tumblr does not function so much as a blank canvas but as a white cube to exhibit a curatorial vision.

to.be, a new social platform, however, allows the reblogger to remix their dashboard. As an "online studio space [to] collage the internet," the to.be user can upload images, videos, and sound from on their desktop, across the web, or directly from their tumblr dashboard onto a "field," or a blank canvas/background/studio space. With simple editing tools that emulate analog collage processes such as: stencil, duplicate, resize, move, layer, pen, paintbrush, paint-bucket, and erase, the user can create original multimedia collages without software such as Photoshop. As a social platform, collages are published to the to.be stream, where they become "pullable" for other users to reinterpret. The best feature of to.be is the "printable" option which materializes your digital piece as a unique object, either wearable as a t-shirt or sweatshirt or hangable as an art print.

to.be's also allows users to embed YouTube videos into their digi-collages. Image via Nick.

Once your piece is added to to.be's object shop, your object can be purchased by others as well. You'll even make $5 every time someone buys one of your pieces. Currently some of the featured items on the object shop include t-shirts by DIS and Eyebeam's Emoji Show. Though as a blogger you may keep your hands clean with each post pristinely gridded within its context, to.be dynamically repositions the user from a complier to a creator--"Just like your studio, it will become a mess."

objects.to.be