Sample, Remix, Display!

Fragmentation: A Brief History

Fragmentation in art is not an invention of the twentieth century, but a gradually emerging recognition—a slow undoing of the assumption that the world, the self, and the artwork are coherent, whole, and rationally ordered. This recognition begins as early as Romanticism, where the unity of Enlightenment thought gave way to the sublime and the uncanny. In the Romantic imagination, the ruins of ancient temples became a theatrical concept: a dramatic setting in which the self could be posed in heightened solitude—an ecstatic inwardness that amplified the sense of the individual as a fragment. The whole was no longer ideal; it was a memory or a mirage.

Later, in the late nineteenth century, Symbolist poets and Decadent artists pushed the boundaries of fragmentation further—in the very fabric of language, perception, and identity itself. Mallarmé’s radical typography in Un coup de dés and Rimbaud’s proclamation of “the I as another” revealed a fractured self, splintered from its own coherence and adrift in an unstable cultural landscape. 

In the early twentieth century, Cubism and Futurism fractured the visible world. Picasso, Braque, and Boccioni shattered perspective into simultaneity, offering not a scene but an experience of time and movement—discontinuous, layered, volatile. Yet these movements retained faith in artistic construction; their fragmentation sought to reveal a deeper structure beneath appearances.

It is with Dada that fragmentation becomes an ethos. Born in the aftermath of World War I, Dada responded not only to a world broken by violence but to the collapse of language, logic, and aesthetic tradition itself. In place of unity, Dada offered nonsense and provocation. The artwork no longer promised coherence; it testified to its impossibility.

Surrealism, rising from Dada’s debris, pursued another kind of fragmentation—less anarchic, more interior. Here, disjunction became a method for accessing the unconscious. Dreams, automatic writing, and juxtaposition revealed a psyche that was itself fractured, populated by symbols beyond reason. The surrealists did not reject meaning, but they abandoned its rational construction. Fragmentation was no longer simply a reaction to history; it became a portal to hidden truths.

By the late twentieth century, Postmodernism embraced fragmentation as a permanent condition. In architecture, literature, and visual art, the postmodern work no longer mourned the loss of unity—it multiplied perspectives, genres, and references without attempting synthesis. Quotation, pastiche, and irony replaced originality and coherence. The canon was not only questioned, but splintered; art became miscellaneous, plural, and reflexive.

In this long arc, from Romantic ruin to postmodern hypertext, fragmentation evolves from a sign of loss into a mode of liberation. It reveals not a broken world, but a world never whole to begin with.

Repair: Collage, Assemblage, and Collaboration

If fragmentation marks the dissolution of unity in modern culture, then collage, assemblage, and collaboration represent its countergesture—not the restoration of wholeness, but a new poetics of connection. These practices do not deny that the world is in pieces; they ask what can be made from the pieces themselves.

Collage begins in the early twentieth century as a deliberate act of cultural montage. With Picasso and Braque’s papier collé, fragmentation becomes construction. The gesture is modest but revolutionary: the artwork is no longer a window onto the world, but a site where the world’s fragments are recomposed. Collage acknowledges that meaning is partial, situated, borrowed—and yet still possible.

With Dada, collage expands into photomontage and textual disruption. In works by Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann, clippings from newspapers, magazines, and advertisements are cut, rearranged, and sutured together into new political and aesthetic configurations. These images speak in fractured voices, simultaneously critical and playful, reflecting the cacophony of modern life. The artist becomes a bricoleur, assembling meaning from cultural detritus.

Assemblage extends this logic into three dimensions. It is sculpture after the loss of monumentality: the anti-statue, the anti-icon. In the mid-twentieth century, artists like Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, and Louise Nevelson create hybrid objects from everyday things—boxes, clothing, furniture, toys. The result is not synthesis but adjacency, a logic of proximity rather than hierarchy. Assemblage accepts that the world cannot be made whole again; instead, it finds grace in its recombination.

But perhaps the most radical answer to fragmentation is collaboration—a relinquishing of the solitary authorial voice in favor of dialogue, exchange, and multiplicity. From Dada’s spontaneous group performances to the surrealists’ exquisite corpses, from Fluxus happenings to contemporary social practices, collaboration resists the singular narrative. It proposes that fragmentation is not just a problem to be solved but a condition to be shared. In collaborative practice, difference is not an obstacle but a resource. Multiple subjectivities, techniques, and traditions coexist without needing to resolve into unity. This pluralism is both aesthetic and ethical: it refuses mastery and embraces co-authorship, hospitality, and contingency.

Together, collage, assemblage, and collaboration offer a grammar of relation after rupture. They do not restore the lost whole, nor do they idealize fragmentation. Instead, they enact a continuous process of composition—imperfect, unstable, and alive.

The Contemporary Fragment: Dispersal and Reconnection

The contemporary art world is more fragmented than ever—dispersed across media, geographies, disciplines, and platforms. Digital technology has multiplied authors, voices, and images to the point of saturation. The canon no longer holds sway; authority is diffuse, and attention splinters across timelines and screens. NFTs, AI-generated works, algorithmic curation, and viral aesthetics disrupt traditional categories of authorship, authenticity, and value. The global art network is simultaneously interconnected and incoherent, driven by immediacy, novelty, and data flows rather than historical continuity.

This is fragmentation as acceleration. Art circulates in pixels and platforms, often detached from place, context, or permanence. The studio gives way to the feed; the object becomes a file; the artist becomes a node. In such a landscape, fragmentation is not only a theme—it is the condition of artistic existence.

Yet within this dispersed terrain, new possibilities of repair are emerging—not as a return to unity, but as the cultivation of meaningful links amid the chaos. Artists turn to collaborative platforms, open-source practices, and distributed authorship to reimagine community and co-creation. The digital realm enables forms of interconnected collage: transmedia works, participatory archives, and multimedia constellations that assemble difference rather than erase it.

In response to algorithmic flattening, some artists engage in acts of care and curation—slower, more deliberate ways of bringing fragments into relation. Others return to craft, ritual, or local materials as a counterbalance to digital abstraction. In this way, repair becomes both a metaphor and a methodology: not the mending of a broken past, but the shaping of new structures of attention, memory, and mutuality.

In the face of technological dispersal, the answer is not to deny fragmentation but to practice miscellaneous thinking—to make connections that are provisional, plural, and open-ended. The contemporary fragment is not a symptom of collapse alone, but a site of potential assembly.

My Practice: Sample, Remix, Display!

I see my work as exactly such a site. The objects I create bring together samples of historical styles, cultural references, and artisanal techniques. These fragments undergo a remixing process; they are reshuffled, recontextualized, and forged into new relationships. The element of display is equally important. My two standard forms of presentation—the cone-shaped object and the square, wall-based panel—function as neutral showcases, akin to those found in a showroom, offering a space for diversity without imposing a preference. My ongoing collaborations with scientists, craftspeople, and fellow artists are central to this conceptual practice of assembly, serving as acts of repair through relation.

One project that crystallizes the history of fragmentation and repair described above is Exquisite Corpse (The Grammar of Ornament), a collaborative work I developed with architects Michael Young and Kutan Ayata. Conceptually, the work brings together two seemingly unrelated sources: Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament (1856), a Victorian encyclopedic compendium of design motifs, and the Surrealist game of the cadavre exquis, or exquisite corpse. Their conjunction became the engine for a new kind of formal play—one that merges historical classification with the radical logic of chance.

We developed five cones, each 42 cm tall and composed of four stacked segments. Every segment features an ornamental motif randomly selected from one of the twenty stylistic categories in Jones’s Grammar. These motifs were assigned to a team of designers within the Young & Ayata practice. Each designer worked in isolation—unaware of what the others were creating—limited only by a shared grid of alignment points and the curvature of the cone. We used digital modeling to thicken the selected motifs into shallow reliefs, added texture and color, and wrapped them onto the cone surface. Then came a second randomized step: assigning simulated materials to each segment—from jellyfish to velvet, parmesan to asphalt—testing the limits of digital fabrication and visual absurdity. The final cones were 3D printed in full-color sandstone. The result, once assembled, is a visual collision: abrupt transitions between styles and forms, much like the unpredictable juxtapositions produced in the Surrealist game. 

Exquisite Corpse plays out the tension between rational taxonomy and irrational assembly, between the ordered grid of history and the unruly energy of remix. Though deeply grounded in ornament and historical reference, it is not a nostalgic work; remix, randomness, and digital materiality move it beyond historical citation and into a space of speculative reassembly