St. John's College

The Graph's creative director Maca Olsen and philosophy scholar Dr. Anna Sitzmann [faculty, St. John's College] posed a playful challenge to themselves: is there a way in which the process of collaging might resemble that of learning?

Just as a student of a liberal arts education dissects texts, examining each word and argument closely in order to apprehend it more clearly, so too does the collagist cut apart images and words, isolating them from their original contexts. This analytical phase is vital, for it allows one to see with fresh eyes, free from the constraints of preconceived meanings. Yet, analysis alone is not sufficient. The next step, synthesis, mirrors the collagist's task of gluing disparate pieces into a new, coherent whole.

In this creative act of reconstruction, the learner, like the artist, may draw upon intuition and imagination as well as reasoning, forging connections and deriving meanings. Through this dynamic interplay of analysis and synthesis, of cutting and gluing, one may learn to see old things anew.

This playful challenge set their minds to work. Having long admired Oliver Byrne's 1847 illustrations of Euclid's Elements, they began to make connections between mathematical propositions, literary passages, and historical portraits of great authors around specific "opening questions" brough forth from a text. Their hope is that these images and musings might get you thinking about something old anew, or simply inspire you to try your own hand at collaging, too.