Wetland is neither land nor water but a third thing produced by saturation. A zone where the constant presence of water reorganizes everything else around the soil, the chemistry, and especially the terms of what can live there. What can live there? Organisms, fragments, files, memes, memory, data? How does one take inventory of these when life is held together by a hard drive? These works start by using the data storage device as a vessel that holds the material which, through a script, is recombined into new imagery. Polymerization.
Wetland is a code based collage series comprised of 395 pieces.
Wetland is built on a custom compositing script. The source material, hundreds of hand-drawn marks, scanned ephemera, found images, and fragments of the artist's own earlier work, is sorted into layered folders, each folder a layer of the image: background, foreground, overlay, texture, border, and corner. The script pulls from these folders and stacks them back to front, applying blend modes and weighted probabilities so that no two outputs resolve the same way. The code functions the way water functions in a wetland: it never settles, it takes the shape of whatever contains it, and it moves material through the system, depositing it altered.
Visually, Wetland descends from recent onchain exploration of maximalist digital collage. This dense, overloaded, and reference-saturated image-making has been referred to as schizocollage. Similarly to the practices of “traitmaxxing” and “layermaxxing”. Layers are buried under an accumulation of other stacked layers decided by the code. They share in the world’s growing appetite for excess.
For collection inquiries, press, and collaboration: vinniehagerstudio@gmail.com
X: @vinniehager
Instagram: @vinniehager
