In front of you lies The Martyr; a green oblong surface which has relinquished itself to the cause of cutting up consumerist lies into mediocre puns, named after its scars inflicted in past wars of wits.
In your left hand, a slightly rusted crafting knife, missing its safety cap. In front of you, a disorganized stack of magazines and newspapers, the topmost is a month old issue of a gardening magazine.
It has been made clear this pile of resources is to be shared, and everyone else in the room has already started to work in unison.
You glance across the table to the workspace in front of the worker opposite you; a slightly menacing image of one side of Stellan Skarsgård wearing Levi jeans, in an unusual pose, amongst a blurred interior background, a single cut out word hovers in the middle of this void; migrants.
Each piece of “literature” here will be maimed and scarred; pages create viewfinders throughout the rest, looking much like a Sarah Sze painting, Feel Free, or Breathless, perhaps – gashes through substance which reveal partial allusions of the imagery layered beneath.
Stop talking about painting, we are talking collage now; bricolage, perhaps, even. It is the internet anthropologist-archaeologist which takes a hundred screenshots a day of unfiltered asinine or interesting web-page comments.
To meme, shitpost, troll, blog and categorise/characterise explores the same sort of attitudes and theories physical collage does.
These magazine pages before you become wounded infrastructure.
What matters is not legibility but exposure, where meaning is not contained but leaks, held together by tape and glue and chance adjacency.
Collaging and reappropriating as methods of reading, research, meaning-making, expression and critique under pressure.
Deterritorialised accumulation – a scraping together of fragments produced by systems you didn’t design but are forced to inhabit. To screenshot, bookmark, archive comments, memes, headlines, UI errors, and half-read theory PDFs is to perform a kind of internet archaeology: not neutral, not objective, but agonistic.
The anthropologist has become a scavenger, a cynical memelord, the archivist a shitposter.
This is where deterritorialisation (via Deleuze & Guattari) becomes practical rather than abstract. Content is ripped from its original context; not to be purified, but to be re-situated in friction. Meaning doesn’t stabilise; it oscillates. The same fragment can function as joke, threat, confession, data-point.
This is also détournement, as theorised by Guy Debord and the Situationist International: existing cultural material hijacked and rerouted so that the system speaks against itself.
The website doesn’t critique the internet from outside it speaks in its accent, using its debris.
Historically, this logic emerges with force after rupture [perhaps overload and disintegration, in contemporary context].
Dada collage after World War I wasn’t playful nonsense; it was a refusal of coherent narratives after mechanised slaughter. Newspapers, bureaucratic language, advertising; cut up because their original authority was obscene.
Collage was a way to show that meaning had already been shattered by systems of power. That feels uncomfortably current.
Today, the rupture isn’t trenches but feeds, dashboards, AI summaries, targeted affect. The response is similar: fragment the fragmenters.
Digitally, this becomes bricolage at scale. Memes, trolling, blogging, tagging, characterising – these are not low-cultural detours but contemporary collage logics.
They operate through pastiche, satire, over-identification, characterisation and recursive irony. This is where projects like Joshua Citarella’s mapping of online ideology or Udith Dematogoda’s Agonist-style frameworks become relevant: not because they explain the internet more accurately, but because they accept conflict, contradiction, and partial knowledge as structural conditions.
The work doesn’t resolve identity or consciousness but attempts to stage their instability. Characters, screenshots, theory quotes, memes – these are performative rehearsals for navigating systems that already demand constant self-modelling.