For this assignment, I chose to teach you an exercise I use often to get my creative juices flowing. This is a warm up exercise. As with any creative activity, sometimes a blank page is a tough hurdle to overcome. The objective of this exercise is to generate ideas for future artwork through exploring the method of collage. The result does not have to be a complete artwork. It could be messy. The key point is not to concentrate on the meaning so much as in putting elements on paper (screen) and combining visual and textual together and then exploring what happens. Granted, we will not be creating brilliance to hang in MOMA’s walls but this could be a stepping stone to brilliance as everything has a starting point.

We will need an artwork by a contemporary artist, like this one by Miami street art artist Typoe :

When I used to teach art classes I always had stacks of ArtNEWS magazines in the classroom for this purpose and would do this exercise with my student whenever we were transitioning between ideas and mediums.

The reason I chose this piece is because the idea of a skull vomiting bright pieces of colors for me resonates with the idea of multi-faceted perspective and juxtaposition of “good” and “bad,” “dangerous” and “benign” and pieces of text. I chose some pages from this work by brilliant Lawrence Lessig to keep in line with the topic of the Copyright:

Now we have to set a bit of constraint for ourselves to keep us focused. I would recommend setting a limit for pages first (I had 3). I also like to limit myself to words starting with particular letters. So for this exercise, I chose to go with the words or short phrases starting with the words that begin with a letter “c.”

Now, read through the pages (I usually open the book blindly and go from there) and cut out the necessary words. These were the 3 pages (click on the image to enlarge):

After you cut the words out, superimpose them onto the artwork image using your own sense of composition and place the words where you feel in the order they belong (this could be a whole semester worth of instruction). You can use any imaging program if you choose the digital route like I did (Photoshop, Fireworks, Gimp) or just move the cutouts physically around. You can also add other elements like I did with the circles to emphasize the idea of a copyright symbol and the dual nature of intentions. Once you feel you are aesthetically pleased (do not overthink it) glue the pieces together or save the digital file.

This is my final result (click on the image to enlarge):

We just created an artifact out of two copyrighted pieces of work taking advantage (in the best sense) of Fair Use because (I used this checklist  http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/):

• we used those works for educational exercise (teaching) and the nature of the work was transformative

• it was important to educational objectives (as an exercise in gaining an insight into a creative process and to fulfill the learning objective for this assignment)

• we took portions of the works (in the case of the artwork it is just a photograph of a part of the sculpture, in the case of Lawrence Lessig’s work it is just about 40 words out of three pages of his 352 pages book)

• the resulting transformative work is not intended for sale or any kind of monetary gain thus creating no significant effect on the market