In today's globalized society, art plays a vital role in shaping culture. It reflects diverse perspectives and fosters understanding among different communities.
In the ever-expanding universe of digital collage, the boundaries between authorship and appropriation blur, and with them, the traditional notions of originality. Within this medium, images—fragments of pre-existing realities—become the building blocks of a puzzle where the individual yields to the collective. Like a modern-day alchemist, the digital collage artist blends textures, forms, and concepts to bring new worlds into existence, conjuring impossible beings and connections that transcend visual or narrative logic. Through this process, images cease to be what they once were, morphing into something entirely new: an entity imbued with its own soul. Walter Benjamin spoke of how mechanical reproduction transformed the nature of art; here, that transformation becomes an elevated poetics of reconstruction, where art no longer belongs to a single vision but to the communion of many.
The question of whether these creations can be called "art" hinges on our understanding of originality, a concept that, in truth, has never been as pure as we like to imagine. Picasso expressed it bluntly: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”Yet in digital collage, the act of "stealing" goes beyond mere appropriation; it is an act of reinvention. Pre-existing images are used as a visual language, borrowed words to compose entirely new poems. This process of recombination, reinterpretation, and recontextualisation is not only valid but profoundly reflective of our times. As photographer and theorist Joan Fontcuberta explains, this is “post-photography,” a realm where the creator is not the one who captures the image but the one who redeems it, elevates it, and imbues it with a magical context that never existed in its original form.
Is this process coherent? More than a logical coherence, digital collage demands emotional and conceptual cohesion. If the worlds emerging from these heterogeneous connections evoke wonder, reflection, or beauty, then the artistic purpose is fulfilled. It is the outcome that matters, not the origin. Digital collage is a mirror of our era: a hyperconnected world, brimming with fragments of stories where nothing is pure, and everything is intertwined. To create from what belongs to others is not only art—it is a philosophical statement: that from the broken, the sublime can arise, that identity can be built from the shards of many, and that within fragmentation lies the magic of the new.
