VOCAT

I added a new letter to my acronym for judging which of my creations are worthy of displaying as an artwork. I added a final T, which allows for it to still have a fun sounding pronunciation.

• V for the vibe of the thing.
• O for originality, does the image look unique, like something you haven’t seen before?
• C for composition, do the different images or layers work together?
• A for aesthetic, does the image look like art?
• T for how transformational the image is. Does it depart from the source material, or is there something from the source material that still defines the image?

The scale is one to ten for each category and of course just arbitrary judgements that I would not likely cast the same way twice. It allowed me to pick this image as the most suitable collage to represent my art today:

It’s suitably abstract, it has a certain style and really doesn’t depend on any one element from the source material. There were many other images that I scored very close to this one. This scoring a 42 out of 50. There were several 41’s today like this one:

Looking through some of the images I somewhat randomly allocated in the daily cutup, if I went through the images again I would most certainly judge differently. I skipped over this one, but I think it deserves a second look:

There are some identifiable features in there but I think the composition works well. Not the best day for collages today. Yesterday there was one simple collage that struck me. I didn’t bother to rate it on the scale, I knew it was the one from the effect it had on me.

It has this kind of after school special sort of feeling. The mask hanging on the door knob and a couple embracing. It’s sort of suggestive, but of what I really don’t know. It stopped and made me think though. Since it feels very now to me, I’ve offered it on Hic Et Nunc as an NFT. Hic Et Nunc, which means “here and now in Latin, is supposed to be a kinder, gentler NFT marketplace using the Tezos blockchain. [Edit – of course Hic Et Nunc is gone now, but the Teia art community has organised around this particular blockchain now and you can still find the NFT there.]:

I’ve stopped creating NFT’s on the OpenSea marketplace for now, using the Ethereum v1 blockchain, but there are 100 NFTs available there in this collection.

I’m closing in on a year of cutups on Coalesce.me. I looked back over the past few months today and it’s an interesting way to reflect back on things. They are like a dream of the news and things I’ve read over the past few months. Some days the cutup is memorable to me, and I remember the quick assembly process and my thoughts and reactions to the text and images, and other days are a mystery and I can’t really remember having seen them before. Some days I skim over the text quicker than others. Sometimes I might look up something a name or phrase that got posted in the text. Or recognise something in an image. Whatever it is I am doing it’s something I have to do. Dealing with the passage of time and the urge to create something.