Photoshop Collage Experiment 1

 

FIRST CONCEPT

My initial collage concept was based around the idea of what it means to be human, more specifically what makes us individuals. The main focus of the collage is that of a wooden manikin, these are mainly used for references in artwork, a form of imitated humanity that we use to depict ourselves. It's multiple arms is inspired by the depiction of several Hindu gods, as many religions believe that we as humans are related to God or the gods by being made by them and/or in their image. The head is that of a polystyrene manikin head with several parts of real human anatomy, as a means of somewhat showing how we tend to place human characteristics to otherwise inhuman things. The legs and central arms of the manikin are also covered by real human arms and legs, edited in a way to appear like paper cut-outs stuck onto the image. These are meant to show the progress we have made in the attempt to replicate ourselves, mainly through making things such as more human-like robots and artificial intelligence. 

 The deep red colour palette of the image is meant to represent blood, a core feature of being alive, with the colour red also representing love, passion and anger. The heart in the hole on the manikin's chest is a metaphor for the idea of how we love, the choice to use an actual heart rather than the more stylised shape of one signifying that what we see as having a heart and what it actually means are different, this being further implied by having the heart be the only part of the collage to have not been posturized.

The phrase repeated on the left of the image "Memento Mori" is an ancient roman phrase translating roughly to "remember you must die" or "remember the man", as to live as human also means to die as one, and thus is a characteristic every person alive shares. On the right of the image behind the skulls is a quote from the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, being the iconic "To be or not to be" speech. This speech is meant to question what it means to be alive, which ties back into the theming of my collage which intends to question what it means to be a human. Finally at the bottom of the page there is a collection of faces, one of which being a sort of mini-collage of a face, each facial feature being from a different person. The people these faces belong to do not actually exist, instead being generating by the website ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com. 

This was done for two reasons. First was that I wouldn't have to worry about getting consent from anyone in the collage, since they don't exist in the first place. And second is that I found it interesting that we can generating faces that look essentially identical to real world people, and that fact once again further blurs the line of what it means to be truly human. I also edited two of the faces in a way to appear somewhat uncanny, as the uncanny valley is a very interesting part of the human psyche that additionally makes us question what's human and what isn't. These two faces were partially inspired by the popular internet Analogue Horror genre, mainly the series "The Mandela Catalogue." Which itself has many themes of the uncanny valley.

Overall I am quite satisfied with what I created for my first experiment, and feel like the meaning of the image has been well established in a way that can be interpreted in a various number of ways. Additionally I am satisfied with the creative use of imagery I have implemented, though there are many things I wish I could have done better, such as the paper cut-out limbs perhaps being done in a way that makes them look more like actual paper that've been stuck onto the image.