The most celebrated section of the Versailles Palace is the “Hall of Mirrors”, or Galerie des Glaces. What actually struck me about the Versailles is its excess — excess of flourish, excess of decoration, excess of glittery shiny things: in short, excess of excess. All doubled by the mirrors. It’s overwhelming. Once upon on a time it was an incredibly exclusive Olympia for the royalty, but there’s something quite seedy about the new populace throng of tourist in tacky clothes milling around like open-mouthed cattle with cameras. What interests me about collaging in a digital media is that I want it to look digitally contrived in a way that blurs the line between “documentary” and “virtual fictional”. A composition of photographs is perceived from an obviously purely fictional form such as a 3D Maya construct or an illustrated image drawn by hand. In a way this mirror of excess reflects our own split identities of reality and fiction in a technological existence where truly, half of our lives are spent in a 0 + 1 universe of text messages, twitters, FB updates, and Instant Messages. It’s funny when you go to a cafe, you see all these people in their own respective laptop/blackberry/iphone pod world and no-one is physically talking or interacting with each other. But at a digital level, every one of these “pod” people is wired to possibly thousands of other presences on the network.