CoCoTrans: Copy, Combine, Transform
This project started as an experiment around a simple idea: everything is a remix.
The setup was deliberately random. We had to pull two pieces of paper from a hat: one with a band name and another with a music genre. I got The Flat Earthers and trip hop.
The task was to create an album cover from those two references, with one important restriction: no computer and no AI. We had to work manually, using a fixed archive of existing album covers as visual material.
I could have taken the obvious route: flat-earth imagery, a dark trip-hop aesthetic, some grain, done.
Technically, brief completed.
But apparently I enjoy creating unnecessary problems for myself, so I wanted an actual reason why those two references belonged together. I did not want to just place them next to each other and call that a concept. I wanted a conceptual bridge.
First, what does trip hop actually feel like?
Trip hop pulls from jazz, hip-hop beats and sampling, but slows everything down and processes it until it becomes heavier, stranger and more atmospheric. There is usually something recognizable underneath it, but it feels slightly removed from the original.
That became important to me: familiar, but altered.
The more I listened to it, the more it felt like nighttime music. Not just because it is slower or darker, but because nighttime changes the way you experience things. When you cannot see everything clearly, your brain does not patiently leave the missing information blank. It starts improvising.
A coat hanging in the corner of your room becomes a human figure, and for three horrible seconds you are completely convinced you are about to get fucking murdered.
Then you turn the light on and it is just a jacket.
Nothing in the room changed. Your interpretation did.
That became the first useful connection.
Then came The Flat Earthers
When I pulled The Flat Earthers out of the hat, my first thought was: well, this could get very conspiracy-board very fast. [Spoiler: it did.]
But the conspiracy itself was the least interesting part to me. What I liked was the idea behind it: the same reality can be interpreted in completely different ways depending on the person looking at it.
We like to think perception is neutral, but memory, expectation and context are always getting involved.
Think about an orange. You do not look at it and consciously process round shape, orange color, rough texture. You just see an orange. Your brain gets there before you do.
We do the same thing with people, places and memories. We hold onto fragments, recognize patterns and fill in whatever is missing through what we already know.
That was the point where trip hop and The Flat Earthers stopped feeling unrelated. One gave me something familiar but distorted. The other gave me a way of thinking about reality as something interpreted rather than simply received.
Perception, meet memory
From there, I started thinking about memory.
We do not experience something and store a perfect little recording of it forever. We remember pieces. Some details disappear, others get exaggerated, and sometimes we add things that probably were not there in the first place.
Yet the memory still feels real.
That is where the album name came from:
Incomplete Recollection
I liked it because it did not describe forgetting completely. It described remembering almost enough.
Something remains, but it has already been reconstructed.
And that brought everything back to trip hop: recognizable material being sampled, slowed down, processed and transformed into something new without completely losing what came before.
The Flat Earthers gave me interpretation. Trip hop gave me atmosphere. Memory became the bridge between them.
Then came the archive
We were given a long archive of existing album covers that we had to use for the experiment. That constraint meant I had to look at what was already there and decide what was actually useful.
The three covers I kept coming back to were these:
In My Mind
BJ The Chicago Kid
Stretcher Case Baby
The Damned
A Moon Shaped Pool
Radiohead
From In My Mind, I was drawn to the distorted portrait and, more importantly, the fact that the mind itself is cut out. Part of the head is literally missing. From the other two covers, I pulled the skull imagery and the liquid, marbled texture.
None of them said Incomplete Recollection on their own, but together they gave me the visual universe to start working with.
Why photography and collage suddenly made total sense
This was the moment where the project clicked for me.
I had already landed on memory as the concept, and then I realised the two formats I was working with: photography and collage, these were basically describing that idea on their own.
Photography starts from the idea of capturing a moment. But sometimes imperfect photography can feel more like memory than a perfect image does. Blur, grain, overexposure, awkward framing or missing detail can communicate what a moment felt like rather than exactly what it looked like.
A memory rarely gives you everything back. Maybe you remember the light in a room but not who was standing next to you. A movement, a face without the details, a color, an atmosphere.
What looks like an error can end up resembling the feeling of having lived something more than its perfect image.
Then collage takes that fixed photograph and messes with it even more. You cut information away, cover parts of it, move things around, combine fragments that were never together and reconstruct a new whole from whatever survives.
A photograph says: this happened.
A collage says: well… this is what I remember.
That scratched a very specific part of my creative brain in a good way, because suddenly the formats were not just execution choices. They were carrying the concept.
Copy. Combine. Transform.
Full disclosure, manual collage is not exactly where I peak as an artist. There were scissors, glue and several cuts that Photoshop could have fixed in about three seconds.
But the exercise was less about perfect craft and more about whether the idea could survive the execution.
Copying did not mean recreating an album cover exactly. It meant identifying what part of a reference was actually doing the work: a composition, a missing section of a head, a texture, a silhouette.
And yes, this is also where I had to force a friend to pose for one of the photographs.
Then came combine. I started mixing those elements in ways they were never originally meant to belong together. Faces were interrupted by textures, portraiture collided with skull imagery, and recognizable figures started losing information.
Finally came transform.
For the last piece, I pulled from all three references, but by then I wasn’t thinking of them as three separate images anymore. I used the self-portrait as the base and started breaking it apart, moving pieces around and letting parts of the image feel slightly out of place.
You can still recognize the person, just like you can still recognize a memory, but you are never given the whole image cleanly.
The references are still there, but none of them owns the final piece anymore. They have been broken apart and reconstructed into something else.
Which, conveniently, is also the whole art of collage.
The tool changed. The problem didn’t.
Looking back, this exercise feels even more relevant now that generative tools can produce polished images almost instantly.
Today, I could type “The Flat Earthers + trip hop” into an image model and probably get something visually interesting in seconds. It might be dark, surreal, grainy and strange enough to feel convincing.
It might even look good.
But looking good is not the same as having a creative idea.
What made this project work was the connection underneath it: trip hop led me to distortion and atmosphere, The Flat Earthers led me to interpretation, memory connected both, and photography and collage gave that idea a visual language.
Without that bridge, the image is just two references sitting next to each other.
That is where I think art direction becomes more important, not less. Generative tools can execute a visual language incredibly fast, but someone still has to decide why these references belong together, what should survive from each one, and what the image is actually trying to say.
Otherwise, you can end up with something aesthetically convincing that falls apart the second someone asks:
“Okay, but what’s the idea?”
For me, that is the real value of Copy, Combine, Transform now. It is not just a way of making images. It is a way of forcing yourself to find the logic behind them.
The prompt is not the concept.
At this point you might be thinking that this is exactly what I looked like trying to connect trip hop, flat earthers, memory, oranges, blurry photography and collage.
Fair.
But this is probably my favorite part: taking things that initially have absolutely no business being together and connecting dots until I hit that “aah, there it is” moment.
Sometimes it probably looks slightly unhinged from the outside
…and I’m okay with that.
