Arcadia by Invertebrate is a project “assembled from images that share the tag ‘arcadia’ in an online photo-sharing website.” Effaced, cropped, combined, and altered, the images then serve as surreal maps of earthly paradise: a stereotyped landscape of personal leisure, backyards, and harmless wildlife, all in the shadow of distant mountain ranges.
Fascinatingly, these are the source images from which Invertebrate built the project.
How would it look, I wonder, if you used the word “prison” as your tag, instead – or “suburb,” “home,” or, for that matter, “paradise”? What about “office” or “hospital” or “factory”? Or, less architecturally, something like “police”?
In any case, don’t miss Borderville, Invertebrate’s earlier and tactically similar project, featured on BLDGBLOG several months ago. For Borderville, “Invertebrate posted a request to the online film community for the titles of movies featuring border crossings. Borderville is assembled out of objects ripped from these movies.”
(Borderville, and Invertebrate, first discovered via Cabinet Magazine).
How wonderful is the internet, where all the arcanum dei will eventually be revealed.
Your last comment about utilizing prison as a title reminded me of an art exhibit I saw by Sandow Birke (sp?). He has a series of classically painted landscapes with maximum security prisons as the focal point. He also had a show in Santa Ana about six months ago showing illustrated pieces from his graphic novel interpretation of Dante’s Inferno, which is set in Southern California.
On the how-to side: An app called MIxell for iPad lets you make these kinds of collages with your own or web images, they all become accessible to others as parts of their collages. The interface is so cool — just use finger or stylus to crop the part of the photo that you want to use in your collage.