Untitled (Assignment 2), Feb 2018.

•  How did you intend to visually communicate your themes/ideas to the viewer in terms of the formal qualities of your collage (i.e., why does it look the way it does?).

Because my project is about mental/visual clutter, I wanted to create a work that appeared chaotic and disorganized, not unlike a computer screen at any given time. The colors of the nature screensavers are unified in the same way that the desktop elements have similar shapes and hues. I was intentional about the repetition of horizontal and vertical elements, as well as the meshing of the landscapes.

• Describe the content-based research you engaged with. Without discussing any expressive aspects of the collage, discuss how this research informed the production of your collage and helped you to critically engage with your ideas.

I think that this project all began with the beginnings of our blogs. I came across some digital art pieces that had this computer interface aesthetic and resonated with the feeling of constantly clicking between windows and closing out tabs and toggling between screens. Behind all of this clutter remains my mountainous landscape desktop screensaver, a reminder of the real world, a quieter and slower one. I also did resonate with our beginning conceptual ideas of billboards interrupting landscapes and corporate visual clutter. All I could think about was everything. I searched the internet for articles about the relationships between nature and the mind and visuals in technology. My idea came back to the screen right in front of me. With tabs unfolding little bits of this greater idea, a project formed. When I see my project, I see myself walking outside thinking about the world to be suddenly overwhelmed with notifications on my phone which leads to all of my different applications which have their own kind of tabs and notifications. When I try to learn more about the world in class, here, too, on my laptop unfolds all these distractions and layers upon layers of busy. What my research did was help me sift through all of these thoughts and ideas to hone in on the idea that there is just a lot going on on our little devices. The multitasking is what helps us to conduct such research, but it is also what fills our brain to the brim when we could just be present in this world, taking it all in.