Trevor Blake: Quit While You Are A Head. Digital image. 1 April 2010.
Trevor Blake: Collage 1988 – 2010
May 2011 Sound Grounds Coffee House
3711 Belmont St, Portland Oregon 97214 United States
Artist’s Statement
My first collages were made in the late 1970s when I was in 8th grade. They were inspired by comic books and advertising, and were meant to be funny. Collage was a way of making a picture that including elements I could not yet draw to my satisfaction. In the 1990s I worked in used book stores. The source material for my collages improved. Collage became a way of making a picture instead of a substitution for drawing. In the 2000s I’ve started learning how to use a computer to make collages.
Collages are evidence that meaning of an image is in the mind of the artist and the viewer, not in the image itself. There is no minimal meaning that is transferred from a source image into a collage. What is seen as the meaning of an image does not reside in the image itself. Therefore laws against hate speech, pornography, and blasphemy are of questionable merit. Projecting meaning onto fragments is how collage works and how the world works. Fortunately, it does work.
Collage is often criminal and immoral, made up of the work of others without credit or compensation. Stating this fact does not excuse it. It may partially cleanse my debt to others that the majority of my works are entered into the public domain.
Collage is enjoyable, inexpensive to produce and encourages design skills. Paper, scissors or a hobby knife, and glue are all that anyone needs.
Welcome to the Easter Challenge! Our panel of experts – Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and our Mystery Guest – have two thousand years to give consistent answer to simple questions about the resurrection of Christ. No proof is required, only consistent answers. Our questions are prepared by Dan Baker, author of Losing Faith in Faith.
Pérák, the Spring Man was an urban legend originating from the Czechoslovakian city of Prague during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in the midst of World War II. In the decades following the war, Pérák has also been portrayed as a Czech superhero. [...] The 14-minute Czech animated cartoon Pérák a SS (The Springer and the SS, also released in English-speaking markets as Jumping Jack and the SS, The Spring-Man and the SS Men and The Chimneysweep), which was released in 1946, portrayed the ‘Springer’ as a heroic and mischievous black-clad chimney sweep, with a mask fashioned out of a sock. He was capable of performing fantastic leaps due to having couch springs attached to his shoes. This cartoon, created by the renowned Czech animator Jiří Trnka and film-maker Jiří Brdečka, featured Pérák taunting the German army sentries and the Gestapo before escaping in a surrealistic, slapstick chase across the darkened city. Trnka’s postwar interpretation of Pérák as a quasi-superhero, defying the curfew and the authority of the German occupying forces, formed the basis for sporadic revivals of the character in Czech science fiction and comic book stories.
Tape fragmentation consists of interrupting the audio input to a tape deck from the take deck. That is, using the tape deck to fragment an audio input.
I often record my environment for source material in audio collages and for cassette correspondence. The portable recorder I use has a pause button that slurs when turned on while recording. I decided to see what it would sound like if I turned the pause on and off rapidly while recording. The results cannot be explained by someone who wasn’t there. The sound is alien and familiar at the same time.
My home recorder has a pause function that is exact and without slurs. Using this deck, I fragmented sounds from the radio (mostly classical music and speech), other tapes I’ve produced and sequences programmed into my synthesizer. I also tried unplugging and plugging in the power cord to the tape deck while recording, but the results weren’t satisfactory.
I believe the best fragmentation comes from speech. One can recognize voices and an occasional word, but the overall effect is the destruction of language. Words are cut apart and re-combined in new and unpredictable ways.
Fragmented tapes are very easy to ignore. If you set your mind to something else while listening to a fragmented tape you will find it easy to block out. It is the kind of destroyed sound that you hear when there is a television on in the next room, or when a radio is playing in a passing car. This background noise effect and the ease of creating fragmented tapes makes them ideal audio accompaniments to performances or exhibits for those with limited access to expensive recording equipment.
from OVO 1 (1987)
reprinted in Sound Choice issue 5.
