Ethan Green — Ratrock Magazine

Feature by Sophie Paquette

Photos by JP Schuchter

Ethan Green is a digital collagist and internet trash sculptor. Using free-associative search queries, Ethan scrubs the archive’s most abandoned, intimate memories––in pursuit of those low-res, ripped, totally fried impressions only accessible through an endless chain of “related images.” Layered, manipulated, and cut-out, these images serve as the exquisite-corpse-anatomy of Ethan’s collages.

Introduce yourself.

My name is Ethan Green and my pronouns are he/him. I'm a senior in Columbia College studying German and English. I make digital collages.

Have you ever worked in material collage?

A few times. I took a creative photography class in high school, and we got to put together a little journal in class. You had the Nat Geos, the best collage material. There's always some crazy shit in those. We made these little collages on the front of our composition notebooks. It was really fun. I always liked cutting things out.

I find it interesting that we still use material words to talk about how we work in digital art. Words like "cutting" and "pasting" imply some manipulation of a physical object, even though it's all digital.

Oh absolutely. The icons themselves are reflective of the physical objects, like the "cut" icon is a little scissor. There's definitely a real physicality to the way that you work in these programs.

What in your practice feels physical to you?

Sometimes you encounter a wacky shape and you can't remove the background easily, so you have to manually cut it out using this little path feature. You click all the way around the image, which takes a really long time. I usually zoom in a lot to get as close to the edges as possible, but this also makes it difficult to discern where one thing starts and the other thing ends, so you get caught up in pixels. You think it would make you more precise, but a lot of times it kind of fucks me up when I zoom in too much. You kind of lose track of what's going on, the boundary of one thing to the next.

There is a weirdness to trying to find the gestalt of shapes, like the shape of shapes, within a photo image itself. With non-posed, “real” or candid photos, the things in the image are not thinking about where they are in relation to the other things. So you really have to work with the image and determine for yourself where things start.

It's also really interesting to do that with something that doesn't have a really determined border. For example, if you want to cut out a volcano, and there's an ash cloud coming out of it, it's up to you to decide where the ash ends. It's very nebulous. That's honestly the functional part of my work that I put the most thought into: how cutting things out works, and where to stop and begin.

In a lot of your pieces, you retain the rectangular aspect ratio for many of the disparate images, and it gives it the look of blown-up pixels. When you have infinite possibilities for manipulating an image digitally, what makes you want to retain that rectangular shape?

My background is graphic design, specifically page design. I was the editor of the yearbook in high school. I'm into arranging within modular sections of a page, so I always work in rectangles, blocking things out. I think that using square images and retaining the original helps to block out a collage, so you're never gonna be able to take in the entire object at once. You can use it to do a little bit of storytelling. I do usually want to have some sort of background-foreground play. Using square images helps to form a background.

Do you consider the reading path of these images?

I think it is something to be read. It's like reading a piece of ekphrasis versus looking at a painting.

When I did yearbook in high school, I started off interested in writing, and I would always try to write these really cool articles for the yearbook. And the editors were like, bro, do you think people read the yearbook? You're ridiculous. They just wanna see pictures.

Some of your collages get to the point where you can consider text as image, too.

In the program I use, you can convert text to path and change text into little line segments, like a mesh. You can warp it. In programs like this, there is an acceptance of text as a purely visual thing. Text is not taken more seriously than any other element in these programs. It can also be manipulated into something less easily recognizable.

I like to go into FaceApp and then use the same filter on my face, like a hundred times until it can't recognize it as a face anymore. A lot of times in a collage, I'll find an element that I like, and I realize I don't really want to use it in the collage, but I'll just take a shape of it and then take that shape and flip it,form two shapes, duplicate that like six times, and then flip it and eventually make it into something completely strange and abstract. In one collage, I found this diagram image and I took a part of it out and then I flipped it and then rotated it then flipped it. Now it looks like a religious symbol or something.

The distorted image operates as a kind of subliminal, too, a secret message in the collage. Do you ever have an image you put down that ends up being completely obfuscated?

Very often. Or it's basically invisible. Especially in some older work, I would just put like 45 images in an 800 by 800 grid. Like just really, really small shit. Every individual image that I put on there, I'm always just like, how can I make this more visible? But at a certain point, I'm just like, I just gotta surrender to the decisions that I've made. And that's fine. When I think I've done that, it becomes a good reflection of my commitment to the process that I will actually be proud of putting out there, regardless of whether one I like gets fucked up by another one.

Sometimes, too, you just wanna preserve the wholeness of an image. Which is funny because often I will take an image and keep the same aspect ratio, but I'll just zoom into it a lot. So you're missing a big part of the original untouched image, but it's still maintaining the same guise as the original image. In reference to the essay you sent me, I'm comfortable blowing an image up, making it a little bit more distorted and grainy, in order to make it easier to understand what it is.

In my artist statement, I talked about searching the internet to uncover stuff that people just left there. I'm always trying to find images that look like somebody took rather than just an image of something. The way that file formats and image storage work on the internet necessitates that they're going to be a lower quality image. And I kind of like that, honestly, it's like a visual marker of authenticity, right?

*de constructions on an instrument - album cover*

That's definitely part of the visual language of our generation, that idea of deep-frying something, an image going through so many hands and channels before reaching your screen. You're getting at this kind of weird specificity, using the associative language of memory or nightmare, but also just the language of memes.

To find images generally, I go into Google Incognito mode, so it doesn't have any of my cache data. I search phrases and strings of words that I free-associate. I always try to search for really specific things because I want to get into something really strange that somebody posted. Past a certain point, Google offers you options that don't exactly match what you want. Those are always the most interesting ones.

It's like how sometimes radio shows will jump onto the same signal on accident and just fade in and out of each other. I put out a beam and I'm looking for a specific signal, and at some point in history, these things intersect and touch my little beam.

Then it also becomes a product of chance.

Yeah, I really like process art. I don't think I could do any other kind of art. I don't trust myself to do anything besides process art.

So, you post predominantly on Instagram?

That's the only place I post actually.

If you had complete control over a viewer's physical circumstances, how would you want them to encounter these pieces?

I like how Instagram has a zoom feature, but it's really shitty because you have to keep pinching and zooming with your fingers. If I could control how people see my pieces, you would initially have to see it on Instagram and deal with all the zooming, the way it reduces resolution, makes things hard to see and blurs stuff in the background. And then somebody would hand you a different iPad with the full resolution image. You can zoom in as you please.

I'm not really interested in what I have to say about my own work, I'm interested in what other people think about it. So I'd also make them write their thoughts down on a flashcard before viewing it on the iPad. So you’d have to look at it on Instagram, you write down your flashcard, and tell me what you think is going on. You’d hand it to me, and then I’d hand you an iPad that allows you to look at it as close as you want.

Have you ever thought about working in moving image, like using GIFs?

I play a lot of video games. Like, a lot of video games. In video games, there's this thing called a fragmovie, which is like the equivalent of sports highlight reels, but for a video game. I wanted to create one of those and then like an art film and mesh them into one.

I am very interested in moving images. Watching film, for me, image takes primacy. What's interesting about GIFs, too, is that they're super lossy. They’re really degraded.

It's funny because these images moved but just went nowhere. It's like if you had a car and you were forced to turn right forever. They're stuck in a little closed-loop, somewhere in a forgotten part of the internet. But they're still moving. If I gave you the search queries I used to find them, you could go and find the original versions of any of these images.

Even just pulling the images of your collages up on my computer, the way the screen organizes and layers them makes a kind of natural collage.

I like looking at the geometry that buildings form between each other. If I'm looking from a certain sight line, I really like looking at that. I also like looking at a bunch of windows open at once on my computer.

These images you've created feel really similar to what it feels like to go walk outside, how you might see multiple ads pasted on top of each other and then pasted on top of a missing person poster. All of these images and words come into contact in ways you really don't expect. And when you see someone with a really graphic T-shirt walking in front of a poster, suddenly that's a collage.

Yeah, the images are a little bit mimetic. It is reflective of the way that I look at things. I'm trying to make things more busy than they are. I used to use a lot of images that I took, like, sometimes a collage would be all images that I took and then Star Trek screenshots. I really like science fiction imagery a lot. I like stuff that looks unrealistically futuristic, especially stuff from the 60's and 70’s.

Like Barbella?

Yeah. Barbella exactly. That shit is dope. Or like, not to be cliche, but like 2001, right? Or Star Trek: The Next Generation, there are a lot of really cool visual effects on that show.

Those types of visual effects have the same feeling of something being degraded until it becomes unrecognizable.

Right, because ostensibly, there are real equivalents, like whatever they used to create the image itself. There's analog to that in sound like, you know, in Star Wars, to get the sound effect for a laser, they just hit a wire or whatever the fuck they do.

Give me a keyword search, no thinking.

Fatimid Dynasty organ grinder daiquiri.

What are you working on right now? What's next?

I'm always in the process of making like four different collages. I want to fill out like 60% of an image and print it, and then my roommate, he's going to draw on the rest of it. And we're gonna hang it in my room on my wall. I'm also working on some stuff incorporating a lot of images of my own hands. Other than that, I'm always just spinning my wheels.

Where else can we find your work?

You can find it on my Instagram @4evrdolphinluv.

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