Organized Chaos

Catherine Beaudoin

Environmental Art

Media Remix Project

July 2019

Response to Creation

Original Image: 

National Geographic Traveler, October/November 2018, page unspecified.

Remix Collage

The original image I was presented with is an areal photo of a main walkway in the Chilean capital, Santiago.  The mural itself titled "Paseo Bandera," or "Walking Flag" in English, permits pedestrians to utilize the street for congregation and movement within the heart of the city.

When given the task to remix this image, I was intrigued by the fluidity of the mural within the linear confines of the street.  Expanding this concept into the natural world, I started exploring movement in nature and humankind's struggle for order.

My background utilizes the quadrilateral shape of the street in Santiago within my three other found images.  In each selected piece, I was looking for juxtaposition of curved and irregular lines, shapes, and forms in contrast to more linear and geometric elements.  In the far left, curving branches are woven by machine, line after line, to create the fabric.  Moving to the right of the image, not only is the text written in a linear fashion with straight and curved lines for letters, but the text itself discusses the environment, bio-technical advancements, capitalism, and government.  These paragraphs debate and inquire about both the natural world and human constructs.  The far right component of the background continues this, exemplifying the linearity of human creation and manipulation of the natural world within the symbol of a wooden ladder resting against a tailored green space.

Congregations of people along the beach group and wiggle like an ameba on the bottom left.  The rigidity of the line I created through their space creates a false sense of order within their formation, just as the street in Santiago does above.

I layered a small slice of another mural in a public space in France in the bottom left.  This juxtaposes with the street in Santiago, as the color is now on top of the people and is completely in order in color, shape, and composition.

I pulled this concept into my middle and foreground to draw upon man's manipulation of the natural world.  Produce hangs from a tree-like shape created by a topographic map.  Within the map, we see straight roads and purple patches indicating human-made alterations to the terrain since the map was printed only a few decades before.

The produce on the tree also indicates human intervention, as the naturalistic fruit varies drastically from the corn comprised of various pills for kernels.

My work reflects human ingenuity and the strive for control, uniformity, and perfection in the context of movement and progression.