COmposite conditions
Composite Conditions by Margaret Murphy is a series of collages made from found and AI-generated images. Each composition uses collage as a reflection of fractured identity, emblematic of a post-Internet and post-cultural condition where images, selves, and histories overlap and overwrite one another.
The series developed from Murphy’s collaboration with "Teen Margaret", a GPT trained on her adolescent diaries. In those notebooks, she collaged covers with magazine cutouts and stickers, creating a visual diary that reflected her written one. Composite Conditions revisits the subconscious impulse to build identity through collage, tracing how images and selves are continually reconstructed as memory, authorship, and technology fold into one another.
Rooted in the long lineage of collage, from early modern photomontage to post-digital assemblage, Murphy extends the medium’s capacity to mirror both past and present cultural moments as expressions of the self and generations, examining how identity itself has become composite. The works include a variety of recontextualized visual materials—text, memes, cinema, and art historical references spanning twenty years of a shifting cultural landscape, both online and offline.
In a world, as Parker Ito observed, that no longer moves in discrete eras but in a state of perpetual remix, the work considers how both human and machine identities evolve through figurative and literal acts of collage and circulation.