In the mid‑nineties, I was working at Tower Records, stuck between an English Literature degree and a future in sculpture. Part of my job was handling unsold magazines—tearing off their covers for distributor credit and tossing the remains.

I didn’t throw them away. I salvaged them. I carried stacks of coverless art, design, and fashion magazines home, cutting and rearranging their fragments into handmade collages. That act—reclaiming and recombining visual culture—became one of my first real artistic practices.

A decade later, I found myself doing something similar online. Scrolling through Tumblr, I wasn’t just collecting images; I was building experimental montages from fragments of a never‑ending feed.

Now, almost two decades after that, my Collage Machines translate that impulse into code. Using custom software, I isolate foregrounds from backgrounds, assemble image arrays, and set them loose inside generative systems. The results are frenetic, playful, and sometimes psychedelic—a digital echo of scissors and glue, animated by algorithms.

This is collage as choreography: a living archive in motion.

Watch these machines at work or explore the tools behind them on Patreon.