Garbage Collage

        I spent this week making a picture collage out of trash and writing poems using movie and television quotes. As you can probably guess, we have continued the theme of remixing into this week’s classes. The Austin Kleon prompt for this week asked me to make a picture collage out of my trash or someone else’s trash. Lucky for me, my roommate and I share the same trash can in our bedroom, so I incorporated both of our trash items in my collage.

        The first item I dug out of the garbage can was an empty manila Amazon shipping envelop. Once I saw the Amazon logo, an arrow in the shape of a smile, I immediately thought that I could cut it out and make it the stem of a flower. With the image of a flower in my head, I picked out pieces of out trash that would make pedals and leaves. In the end, I had a pile of trash that included a green Mist Twist soda bottle, a clear plastic Aquafina bottle, a red tag off of Vans shoes, and an orange Combo wrapper.         

         In order to create my flower, I first tapped the Amazon logo to a piece of paper and then, ripped the green label off of the Mist Twist bottle. I cut this label into two leaves and attached them to the bottom of the stem. Next, I cut the combos wrapper and the label off of the water bottle to make the pedals of the flower. I used the Vans tag to make the center of the flower’s pedals. After cutting and gathering all of these pieces, I arranged the top of the flower and taped it to the page. After securing the pedals, I picked up my collage with both hands and held it up in front of my face. It looked to plain. I decided to add a sun in the corner using the Amazon package and the Vans tag. With my masterpiece complete, I looked at it as a whole. It is clear that the elements used to make it were once trash, pieces of the labels are still recognizable. Despite being made out of garbage, my collage turned out to be vibrant and can be clearly identifiable as a flower.

        Our remix lesson in my Writing for Digital Media class had me completing projects in never would have thought to do, like blacking out a page in Moby Dick to make a poem, using trash to make a collage, and rearranging movie and television quotes to make poems. What surprised me about my project for this lesson, creating poems out of movie and television quotes, is that I was able to create poems despite not being that experienced with writing poetry. Typically, poetry is not my chosen writing style, but I found this form to be appropriate given that I had short quotes to work with.

My project is included under the “Remix Project” tab in my blog.