We love collage. We like to imagine what it was like to be Matisse, to glue one piece of tissue paper on top of another and Voilà! invent collage, or those early Victorians who did it first, but didn’t know what they were doing was called, cutting and pasting their portraits of their lovers’ heads on paintings of butterflies or enameling eyeballs of dead people they cared about inside rings and lockets.Of course, the computer era has exponentially increased the amount of cutting and pasting that goes on in our culture. Every day, every one of us cuts something from a document or website, and pastes it somewhere else, whether it is a line of text, an image, or even a video. We live in an age of collage that Matisse and Rauschenberg never could have dreamed of.Still despite the many mundane ways we mash things together, whether for work or play, we are still thrilled by art that really test the limits of what all this mass amalgamation can amount to. One such project that has come to our attention recently is Foresight’s Cut and Paste Cities.In order to drive positive urban change, the site is hosting a UGC experiment in which you are invited to send in photos of things you love about your city to “paste” and also photos of things you would rather remove to “cut” out. When the project ends, there will be a photo exhibition made up of the curated UGC photos, stories, and insights that the site accumulates over time. We can’t wait to see all those amputated utopias and the collections of dilapidated locales that have been exorcized from them. In fact, we’re not sure which we think we’ll like looking at more.
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