Introduction:

Art is the manifestation of a variety of human intellectual activities that is an innately human need. Since the beginning of the 20th-century contemporary public art has been appropriating increasingly manufactured and/or raw leftover materials to make creative, aesthetic and/or expressive works. Consequently, the transformations and upheavals that are taking on in the world today are inextricable from the artist’s practice and the transformation of the art.

The global digital revolution is now leading us to a new civilization as a transition takes place towards communication and information technology and digital art programmed. Digital art is recognized as the 'new' that intervenes in a reconfiguration of the 'real' itself. Through the image and its determinants are manipulated, the transformations and effects receive, it enters into a dialectical relationship with a rhythm of the matter with which it is made. A creative mind emerges from neural connections in cognitive relationships. The word collage means making (of the French), that is, assembling a form constructed by cutting and combining different materials to form an aesthetically satisfying whole. The composition becomes digital, gets saved and is shown thereby sharing to an audience.

Research Problem:

Art is an important necessity of the human life. It expresses ideas, conveys feelings, enhances taste and sensibility people and nations. The production and development of the graphic image web has altered contemporary visual art and art more broadly, and also digital collage more specifically. Digital collage refers to another type of digital artwork that is made by adapting materials for a specific purpose/intention. The research problem can be used to frame the following question.

Is it possible for digital collage art to help in aesthetic photographic imagery integration?

Significance of the Study:

The importance of this study stems from the following:

• There is a lack of extensive study of digital collage in relation to photography.

• It may also provide a better outlook for future studies on digital collage and photographic practices.

Research Objectives:

This study aims to:

• Identify the general concepts of digital collage and photographic art.

• Assist researchers in applying these concepts within their future work.

Research Terminology:

Collage

It refers to the use of conceptual art. A collage consists of something that is made up of different pieces, drawings and abstractions made out of newspaper clipping and advertisement as per Al-Ma‘ani Arabic–English Dictionary.

Collage concept

The word collage originated from the word collie meaning glue. Around the early 20th century, when collage became a vital ingredient of modern art, the term was introduced by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. It is a basically cut and paste technique used to compose a visual which uses the principle of collage.

Collection of artworks.

It is the process of cutting and using several materials and assembling them in one composition, and it is considered one of the forms of abstraction art (Al-Assaf, 2004: 10).

Digital Art

The ability to convert colored picture information into digital information with an effective storage system, thereby allowing effective processing and correct reproduction of the colored picture information. These can also be transmitted and shared through multimedia

The computer-generated message is one of the most current types of the visual art inform. Because of the use of 0’s and 1’s; it is called digital. The pressure of the hostility that the different forms and orientations have been grouped together give rise for this field to refer to online art.

Different Creative Practices

It is a digital process based on collage procedures, through which professional programs are used to generate another compositional outcome. It allows modification of one picture, or combination of several pictures, in a hyper-realistic manner (Fawaz, 2014: 58).

Research Methodology and Procedures:

Research Method:

The researcher adopted the descriptive method (content analysis).

Research Boundaries:

• Thematic Scope: The aesthetics of digital collage in photographic imagery.

• Temporal Scope: 2010–2016.

• Spatial Scope: Germany, Canada, Greece, and the United Kingdom.

Research Sample:

The researcher employed random online selection to determine the sample, as follows:

• Four contemporary international artists were selected, represented by nine digital collage works.

• A sequential classification was assigned to each artist and their corresponding works.

Chapter Two: Theoretical Framework of the Study

1. History of Digital Collage Art:

The modern artist employs a variety of art practices as a means of expressing a wide range of thought and philosophy.

The technique of collage has transformed in the expertise and method in which it is produced. Over the years, interaction of visual values and viewer’s response to them, was increasingly becoming the need of the creative process. This Process design is empowered in digital culture. Due to technological innovation and advancement, digital art owes its historical roots to earlier times, when the nineteenth century came into play. Based on this idea, art can be viewed as a kind of architecture which the computer revolution was later built (Al-Qurra Ghuli, 2005: 50).

The contemporary digital art probably the main direction of postmodern artistic practice applied in art, especially in the West, where the historic and modern stages of work have been written for a long time. Digital Collage refers to the technique of collage in visual arts, which uses digital software to create new compositional output. This may involve changing a single image or joining different images in a hyper-realistic way.

The challenges of the digital age show that the original substance collage technique is disappearing through the cut-and-paste method. In fact, it has been able to survive new and different tools to suit the needs of the twenty-first century, especially fast production. Digital collage techniques testify to this, bringing sophisticated design software to bear on the modification of a given image or else to join a set of things in a hyper-real formative way.

Digital collage refers to a specific kind of collage found within a broader category of collages. Millage is no different from collage. It relies on the assembling of images. Nonetheless, it does not depend on merely being a lot of different objects that are layered on top of each other and combined.

It utilizes various materials. In addition, it is a computer system that is aided by a software known as design software. It allows for producing aesthetically pleasing results. The digital collage serves as a medium to archive artworks as part of the artist’s digital memory and visual cataloguing, a register of lived experiences that an individual does not want to delete but through which they produce but to store (Mohammed, 2012: 33–35).

2. The History of Photography and Artistic Schools

The Dada kept appearing at this time and surrealism had been rising in the 1920s photography was a surrealism du growing out of the camera. The artists used oil painting to express ideas generated in their minds and reflect on reality. Initially, the photographers took real-life subjects but gradually they deviated from reality and moved away from the real towards the unreal that was submerged in the subconscious mind and began to depict visions, symbols and dreams. Through this, surreal photography drew on unconscious processes of the mind that spring from the depths of our being.

This tactic involves the creation of a world in imagination and waking dream. This often takes the form of extremely detailed and often very realistic images, rendered into this surrealist expression. Some commentators have given it the name “realistic surrealism”, or a combination of opposites, in one single form. Over the years of artistic ideas and philosophical orientations, various visual designs came up in photography. They therefore practiced traditional and digital photography in accordance with different schools of visual art (Bilal, 2019: 3).

The process of overlapping and assembling various kinds of images cut from one or two sources is called photomontage. Typically, the composite is re-photographed so that the resulting image can be treated as a photographic print. According to the (Dali, 2002: 8).

Dadaism artists utilized photomontage techniques during the early twentieth century. Dadaism was a contemporary art movement that arose during WWI. The purpose of this movement was to subvert and parody the modern world through the absurd.

In their work, they often remixed original pictures and used appropriation strategies. At that time, feminist artworks often rejected conventional patriarchal norms. This rejection, however, produced distinctive forms of artworks that were very unique. Both the means and components belong to’something else’ to tie them into contemporary history.

Numerous European artists collected images from popular media. According to the French artist and poet Francis Picabia, the term ‘Dada’ (meaning nonsense or no meaning). The strange works of art they produced gave rise to thought-provoking conversations about gender, politics and creativity during a tumultuous period in the west. In this context, photomontage offered fragmented but revealing insights into the German culture of this interwar period regularly from the odd feminist perspective (Bate, 2003: 15).

As early as 1857, Oscar Gustave Rejlander, a Swedish photographer, created a complex photographic montage in his studio in England, which he called a compositing. Over the course of time, Rejlander became a leading photographer in England who often cracked lighting’s complexities. This is an example of one of the earliest known examples of photomontage or photo manipulation (Eismann, 2002: 25).

Although Erik Johansson is a rookie, he is nevertheless making a significant contribution to surrealist photography. The key works of Johansson are representative of how the photographic process is shifted and the possible range of the artistic is expanded through digital processing software. His text Imagine collects 50 of his most important pieces between 2007 and 2015. The works of his are mostly anti-realistic and surrealistic. Each image consists of about 100 photos that are arranged together to provide a united and realistic effect in one shot (Bilal, 2019: 11).

In this connection, the concept of a visual metaphor has also been used. We are associating an entity with another, when we say this is a metaphor. The interrelationship of a pair of two is the basis. The saying describes someone’s personality comparing them to a cloud as far as generosity is concerned. It is signifies the notion of being generous because a cloud gives rain and life on the earth.

In this case, we have all the elements for simile, there is a subject, there is an object of comparison, comparison tool, and the basis of comparison. A metaphor can be defined as a simile that has been exaggerated to an extent. An implied metaphor substitutes one element for another without explicitly stating their comparison. The metaphor is when they say ‘The clay forgot that he was clay’ what is left out is human being which is implicit and that which is clay is expressed. Disbelief is darkness and faith is light as per the Qur’anic verse ‘Allah is the protector of those who believe; he brings them out of darkness into light. The original referents have been left out.

Chapter Three: Analysis of Works

1. Feminist Issues in Digital Collage Combined with Photography in the Works of Eugenia Loli and Jesse Treece

Eugenia Loli Surreal Artworks are created from cutting and pasting photographs. In the beginning, she was into photographic collages and in 2013, she adopted digital collage compositions. You can use the scissors or cutting method to make collages in which pictures are cut out from magazines or books and worked upon in Photoshop.

People have been sewing the collaged paper since a long time. The concept of collage has become quite popular with blogging culture, especially amongst the younger generation millennial in recent years. In the 20th century, modern art was the era for the origin of abstract photography. This technique involves bringing together different materials, layering shapes, and varying sizes. The facility creates a palette of forms transferring from canvas to the third dimension and allowing freedom to the artist.

Present-day creators like Eugenia Loli use collage art to playfully approach subjects of race, power, feminism, and other forms of social justice. Her creations all have a meaning above what you think they do. Artwork has the potential to become interactive. But only the viewer, not the artist, can do so. She states that to convey a message for her work. In one of her interesting views, she takes a jaundiced view of consumption claiming that art loses its value if too commercial.

To design a collage digitally, one can follow these steps.

• A computer with any image-processing software (such as Photoshop Elements or GIMP) is required to complete this exercise. It comes with all the layering, brush and editing tools you need to design.

• Images to use, for example human figures, can be made at chosen resolution. For example, 500 pixels. Further, digital canvas can be of larger size. For example, 3000 pixels. Issues with the image quality can be solved through filters and adjustments. You can selectively edit high-resolution pictures.

• An poster-style image is created in RGB Mode with a resolution of 180 dpi and a transparent background. The format of image manipulation determines the mode of execution. The work can be progressively saved using Photoshop making use of rectangular formats (ratio 2:3) or square formats (ratio 1:1).

• To take an image, copy the image and select the layer you want. Employ the eraser tool and others to smooth edges and erase areas you don’t want. Filter layers can help incorporate color grading, as well as any filters or curve adjustments.

In a private interview, an artist expressed how people see something different from what she wanted her works to be. On one hand, she hopes this is a good thing since art has always been made for the people, so having different takes will only enhance the meaning of the art.

She thinks about What Technology Does. Even though she is less consumed by technology today, she foresees that mankind (for the time being) will remain a human-tech society. According to her, disconnection from tech is not going to be possible when many people want to go back to nature.

Politics is also one of the themes of her writings. According to her, audiences tend to reject artistic work that is openly political unless the art is satirical. One of her creations (Fig. 1) shows the skeletal structure marking the boundaries of human existence What we experience and understand is limited, suggests our limits.

Figure (1): Eugenia Loli, Digital Collages, 2013

The lower levels will stand for development and learning in the bid at alternative routes. The background fire is representative of all the conflict and pain the event has caused or will cause. The cube appears to be a human-made object which is suspended higher than ground level.

The second dimension is the process of enlarging your horizons which leads you to enlightenment. The woman in black seems ready to take the plunge. A man standing on a staircase tries to get a hold of her but cannot. Entities that are attempting to slow human progress may be behind his presence. The limits of the composition. The fundamental compositional limits include the sub-inclusion the seen universe.

Two climbers seem to be making a summit attempt. One rises by a traditional route, the other by tech. And the latter might belong to a non-human entity. It is proven that both procedures are feasible. However, in this instance, they hardly seem human anymore.

On the third floor, the trophy is in the middle on the panel in front of the angels. The final goal is considered the object of the climber. Maybe, it’s an illusion or trap after all. It is thought that ‘Great’ Level Eight is the hardest level where one has to drop their vices, illusions and. Most people block their own ability to become the change and never achieve it. The image of a flower half-concealing a human skull reinforces the idea of a struggle within.

The figures above have traveled the journey. The representation of consciousness, exceeding the commonpoint of view, is placed outside the frame of abiding composition. The above suggests a dimension which is beyond time and space. A planet above the Earth could also exist in an alternate layer. Our knowledge or wisdom is never complete; there is always more that can be known or experienced.

Figure (2): Eugenia Loli, Mixed Media Collages, 2014

According to Jesse Trice, the second artist, difference, diversity, and beauty lies in the coming together of two. Within the art scene, collage is how this aesthetics comes true. The French word, collar meaning ‘to glue or to stick' gives rise to the word collage. Since its groundbreaking beginnings in the early 20th century, collage has been used for many things. At present, it covers all areas from children’s activities to high art, showing that it can be found in all areas of art.

Figure (3): City of the Dead, Courtesy of Jesse Treece, 2016

Through this artwork, Jesse Treece takes us into yet another imagined universe. In City of the Dead (Figure 3), a skull breaks the horizon while the misshapen golden halo of a half-moon hovers above skyscrapers. These ingredients can reshape the curves of a mountain slope. As one examines the artwork further and more closely the golden warm colour palette of the first part of the artwork catches the eye of the viewer.

A closer look will reveal differences of opinion and many a time mention of an artwork. The design tension creates the impression of the impossible, the idea of a world which does not obey rules, logic or the structure of the lived real. In each of his works, Treece seems to create a narrative line or aesthetic continuity that appears to link together the disparate elements as one. The works of this artist centre almost exclusively on worlds that possess their own internal logic, which they develop themselves.

Treece creates compositions in all of his works which, together, resemble an assembled environment or system. In Beach Daze (Figure 4), the artist combines a beach landscape with the clear blue sky. The colors in the most recent visuals appear more cohesive thanks to the fading of bright light and attention to the shadows of the walking figures in the scene. It is a wash that dulls things up but gives a sense of menace. One view of the narrative is as a fictional tale about three shipwrecked people washed up on a strange beach.

We cannot say whether this is a story or an extract from a surrealistic dream. There are no personal merits. It is an open-ended work that displays the creative world where uncertainty is articulated like a reassuring visual proposition.

Figure (4): Beach Daze, Courtesy of Jesse Treece, 2016

2. Surrealism in Political Issues in the Work of Danai Gkoni

Digital artist and architect Danai Gkoni has studied and worked in both Greece and the Netherlands. Since 2013 she has been exploring a unique approach to digital illustration through surreal – and sometimes constructed – urban narratives.

Gkoni noted that her work carries a negative political reference. In 2012 she started working with collage when Greece was suffering from the economic crisis due to political conditions which had an impact on society and the atmosphere of the city of Athens. Her early work, There Is No Outside, tried to show capitalism as a distortion with no outside, but an inside. She has been exploring digital collage since then, drawing inspiration from the cities she has lived in as spatial and social environments. Her photographs are both man-made and captivating.

Having trained in architecture, she is quite interested in space, built form, urban life and aesthetics. Her collage series Urban Crisis draws from the political and socio-spatial condition of Athens with the use of humor and contrasting colors. The city has a duality as both a pleasure and a pain place in the novel. Through the pop-surrealist interpretation of reality, her work may be understood as either dystopian or pleasing to the eye.

In collage, I expression through digital surrealism adopting processes of approximation and reconstruction. It combines humour, surrealism, and socio-political critique, among other things. Gkoni’s artistic practice speaks to the meaning of space, The city as a space of collective engaging and isolating. In her digital piece (offered in figures (5), (6) and (7)), she looks for those conceptual dimensions.

If you were to describe Athens’s beauty as a kind of jolie laide expression to someone who is unfamiliar with the city’s structured chaos, it means that it is ugly in a way, but that’s what gives it its charming character. According to the literary critic, Daphne Merkin, this expression means a triumph of character over mere beauty.

Gkoni, who has risen to prominence with projects such as Urban Crisis Resort, highlights how unique Athens is and how it cannot be confused with Paris, London or Vienna. Her visual three-dimensional compositions connect strongly with those familiar with the city. Even in the absence of Athens, her work captures a world of contrasts forged by urban dwellers still working though years of austerity and hardship.

Urban Crisis Resort is the name of the project created in 2012 during the peak of the crisis. Coined by artist Natasha Gkoni, the term carries the sense of an emergency that no longer exists. The city experienced a very high growth in tourism at the same time. The city, according to her, has transformed into a post-crisis resort. She often refers to Athens as a bipolar city, with different moods. Her paintings often combine colourful, fantastical elements with dull city skylines, giving them a feeling of sterility and hope.

At their request, Gkoni studied architecture, seeing it as a good way to channel her artistic inclinations through a specific discipline. She characterizes architecture as capable of transforming the mind, though her love lies in graphic design. Architecture has had a great influence on her work, with buildings and structural forms often being the main subjects of her pieces. Her artistic practice has had less of an impact on her architecture than the architecture has on her art.

Upon finishing her studies in Athens and attaining a master's diploma in the Netherlands, she came back in 2012 to her hometown which is the port city Nafplio. In a time spent away from everyone else, she devoted a lot of time to refining her collage practice and produced quite a lot of work.

Following her career, local events, first solo exhibition, projects on commissions and pop-up at TAF (The Art Foundation), a multidisciplinary cultural space in central Athens, she has participated in various exhibitions. The Contrust, a collective design space in growing district was also launched along TAF exhibitors. This development is reflective of the post-crisis mood in Athens, where a more youthful creative class sought to reclaim the city and their future.

Gkoni's academic work including her master's dissertation Artists, Gentrification and Resistance: The Example of the East End in London focuses on those. The author believes that artists who do not consciously work in the context of gentrification but relocate to an economically unsuccessful district are performing an act of gentrification. She notes that she is a kind of “unintentional facilitator” in all of this.

Figure (5): Danai Gkoni, 2014

Figure (6): Danai Gkoni, 2016

Figure (7): Danai Gkoni, 2016

Metaphysics in Digital Collage Art in the Work of Elizabeth Zvonar

The influence of seductive excesses of capitalism and the balance of this excessive world has long been of interest to Elizabeth Zvonar’s work. Zvonar also touches on patriarchy, Western feminist history, and the feminine body as commodity along these lines. In her most recent presentation, she exhibits her familiar collage practice, which has been digitized and expanded. Zvonar is creating collages more than twenty years in her works. Her previous works are such a radicalism, while the more recent ones are more restrained and reduced, generally consist of two contrasting elements.

Using scissors and a precision knife, Zvonar assembles her sculptural works from a wide variety of found images made from the art, fashion and lifestyle magazines. Thanks to mid-century documents like Connaissance des Arts and celebrity documents like Vogue US into the twenty-first century, the literature succeeds. The artist’s collages bring visual elements from different temporalities and publications together. The artist has accumulated these collages for a long time.

Zvonar’s intuitive and processual outlook remains open to uncertainty, especially when it comes to the indesired outcome of repetitive haircutting and gluing the pictures. It can be viewed as a type of strategising that allows for resisting cultural invasion by capitalism. According to Zvonar’s perspective on her work, impact should be ambiguous and unforeseen. Cultural production which does not refer to structural rules beforehand but originates from the knowledge of the locality.

Consistent with this methodology, her recent work evokes a wide and eclectic set of inspirations, cultures and fields of knowledge. This includes postwar feminist writings such as those of Simone de Beauvoir and the early 20th-century esoteric ideas of P. D. Ouspensky on cyclical time and the effect of cartoon interpretations of Einstein’s relativization & his theory. Zvonar utilises the remnants of Western visual culture – unexpected fragmented meanings which create an ambiguous iconography that resists closure.

By presenting surreal assembly scenarios that utilize triptych formations, Zvonar tackles the legitimate composition of dominant systems of value, patriarchal-political power and consumerism, which construct idealized representations that can never be reached. In her visual imagery, a metallic futuristic mask with a split face is depicted revealing a bright interior, or a hand forming a peace/victory sign repeated “New Feminism.”

The artwork encourages spectators to rethink how other ways of living could be imagined and constructed simultaneously.

Figure (8): Face, Inkjet Print of a Hand-Cut Collage, 2010, Elizabeth Zvonar

Figure (9): 2014, Courtesy of Elizabeth Zvonar

Results

An important aesthetic dimension has been realized for these works, which made use of presenting the research problem, formulating the central question, reviewing some Arabic and foreign sources, and finally displaying and analyzing the digital works. One way is to use digital technologies to engage with issues of social and political relevance to society.