Deck-Collage

Interdisciplinarity and Antidisciplinarity is a seminar offered by the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM) at Princeton University that investigates how scholarly and scientific knowledge is produced, the histories of academic fields, the diverse paths of professionalization, institutional processes, and the social and financial aspects involved. In the course, participants voluntarily commit to creating a collaborative final project in an unknown form, theme, and execution. Students and faculty of diverse backgrounds collaborate in reading, discussing, and experimenting with the goal of creating something new together. 

Here, I present the outcome of the 2022 iteration. We decided to explore the shared yet disciplinary practice of citation and annotation. At our final meeting, we worked in pairs to create five wall-sized collages. Our work comprised silent conversations of excised texts and notes compiled over the semester, followed by rounds of reflection (colored string) and further annotation (tags). To preserve what we did that day, I photographed the collages and later digitally reconstructed them into high-resolution panoramic images. These images were again ‘cut’ to form playing cards, inviting opportunities for reassembly and perhaps re-combination. We named the project DECK-COLLAGE, referring to an act of “unsticking ... an art of ‘taking things apart’; a practice of anti-collage, a body of work achieved through cut-up and cut-through” (Prof. Burnett in Deck-Collage, 2022).