Digital Montage: On Collage and the Legacy of Modernism数字蒙太奇：论拼贴艺术和现代主义传统

Copy-Paste. Today we take for granted this functionality on our laptops as if it had always been there. But the fragmentation， dislocation and recombination of visual and textual content only have a short history that finds all its meaning in art. Flourishing in the early 20th century through the movements of Cubism， Dada and Surrealism， collage and montage still have a visible impact on digital art. Beyond its actual process， the practice brought distinct aesthetics and new ways to represent society and technology.

如今，我们对笔记本电脑的复制粘贴功能早已习以为常，仿佛它一直都在。其实，视觉和文本内容的剪切、移置和重组出现的时间并不长，而且只在艺术领域受到关注。20世纪初，随着立体主义、达达主义和超现实主义运动兴起，拼贴艺术和蒙太奇迅速发展，至今对数字艺术仍然有显著影响。除了实际操作，拼贴艺术还带来独特美学以及反映社会和技术的全新方式。

Collage： Kicking off the information age

拼贴：开启信息时代

Collage is the action of pasting （in French）; montage is the action of assembling. Depending on your affinities， the artistic practice might bring about the vision of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso’s Papiers collés， the geometric compositions of Jean Arp， the photomontages of Hannah Höch， Raoul Haussman and John Heartfield， the Merz assemblages of Kurt Schwitters or the surreal narratives of Max Ernst. All these productions vary greatly. Yet they mark a shift away from the traditional art forms of painting and sculpture into a new media whose style and content both reflect changes in society.

collage一词源于法语，指粘贴的动作，montage则指组装的动作。每个人的喜好不同，拼贴艺术引发的联想也不同，如乔治·布拉克和巴勃罗·毕加索的纸贴法，让·阿尔普的几何构图，汉娜·霍赫、拉乌尔·豪斯曼和约翰·哈特费尔德的照片蒙太奇，库尔特·施维特斯的“梅尔兹”集合艺术，或马克斯·恩斯特的超现实主义叙事。这些创作迥然不同。不过，它们代表着艺术从传统的绘画、雕塑转向一种新媒介，这种媒介的风格和内容都反应了社会变迁。

The end of the 19th century set pace for an industrialised culture. Train and mail， cinema and radio， entertainment and consumption became reachable at an increasing rate. Images turned widely available with entry to museums and movie theatres， but even more so with the beginning of shutter photography. The commercialisation of portable cameras and roll films in the late 1880s made the recording of photographs accessible to the masses. Likewise， the arrival of autotypy allowed for the mechanical reproduction of images. Pictures and illustrated prints went mainstream for the first time， with an unprecedented boom of the press media in the 1920s.

19世纪末，文化开始受工业化影响。火车和邮政、电影和广播、娱乐和消费加速大众化。人们进入博物馆和电影院，得以广泛接触到图像，照相技术的兴起更是提升了图像的可及性。19世纪80年代后期，便携相机和胶卷逐渐商业化，影像拍摄走进千家万户。同理，复写的发明也为图像的机械复制创造了条件。20世纪20年代，新闻媒体业空前繁荣，图片和插图印刷品首次成为主流。

Accelerated modern perceptions required art forms to reflect hectic lifestyles， and collage brought this dynamism. Artists sourced content either in photographs， newspapers， labels， advertisements， theatre tickets or other urban substance. When combining fragmentary images from different spatiotemporal1 situations， artists documented or altered an overarching2 vision of modern times.

现代感知体验加速，艺术形式需要反映忙碌的生活方式，拼贴就此大放异彩。艺术家们取材于照片、报纸、标签、广告、电影票等城市物料，在组合来自不同时空的碎片化图像时，对包罗万象的现代图景或如实描摹、或加以改变。

Turning to digital tools

转向数字工具

The appearance of media for digital image processing and recording， as well as the use of computer software to edit verbal and visual content， changed the scope of collage dramatically. One process that encapsulates3 the move from mechanical to digital reproduction is scanning—scanners provided with the possibility to translate analogue4 information into digital data. Images could be transferred instantaneously without losing the sharpness of the originals; in other words， more copies， better， faster.

处理和记录数字图像的媒体的出现，言语和视觉内容编辑软件的应用，都大大扩展了拼贴的范畴。扫描仪能将模拟信息转换成数字信号，扫描这种操作便是从机械复制向数字复制转变的缩影。图像实现即时传输，且清晰度丝毫不减。也就是说，可以复制得更多、更好、更快。

Robert Rauschenberg， who knowingly used collage as a technique to reflect on American visual culture， consumerism and the mass media， pioneered the use of scanners in his later works of the 2000s. The artist assembled photographs which he then transferred individually on paper before photographing and scanning the resulting copy.

罗伯特·劳申伯格有意用拼贴工艺反映美国视觉文化、消费主义和大众传媒，于是在2000年代后期的作品中开创性地使用扫描仪。他将各种照片组合在一起，然后分别转移到纸上，再拍照扫描成品。

Many contemporary artists such as Ria Patricia Röder follow this tradition in mixing analogue and digital through the use of scans. Her scanograms are digitally created with the scanner without any further manipulation after the exposure. As such， the scanner not only helps with creating a final， digital rendition but acts as a tool to manipulate 2D and 3D objects to provide effects of focus and blur， and intriguing perceptions of dimensionality.

许多当代艺术家遵循这一传统，用扫描仪混合模拟信号和数字信号，例如里娅·帕特里夏·勒德尔。她的扫描作品是数字化创作，用扫描仪曝光后没有再进行任何加工。由此看来，扫描仪不仅促成最终的数字化视觉再现，而且是一个对2D和3D素材操纵自如的工具，能制造出聚焦或模糊的效果和新奇有趣的维度感知体验。

Internet： A new source of graphic traffic

互联网：图像信息流的新来源

Along with digital technologies， the internet revolutionised our approach to images， written material， and by extent， collage. Suddenly， press institutions and companies were not the only one to spread content （at a cost）. All people could create， distribute， and access information for free as browsers advanced the democratisation of the web. With internet channelling vernacular5 knowledge， people could relate to， empathise with， and appropriate others’ content. The amount of data available gave artists a new breath in collecting and recalibrating existing material. An excellent example is Lorna Mills， who creates GIFs from online videos which she fragments and displaces out of their first interface. Her use of re-contextualisation offers a gripping portrait of online communities which parallels social depictions found in Modern collages.