Schizocollage

File:Schizocollage.jpg

Example of a schizocollage NFT composition, 2023.

Schizocollage is a visual and conceptual aesthetic coined by Brian Droitcour in a discussion of the Avant NFT Wave and Gay NFT scene. It is defined by the dense layering and juxtaposition of disparate visual or cultural fragments until the distinction between subject and background, image and noise, collapses into pure infodensity.

While the term encompasses a broad digital-collage tendency, within NFT culture its generative form is often referred to as traitmaxxing—the overaccumulation of visible layers in an NFT to the edge of legibility.

Overview

Schizocollage represents an aesthetics of excess—an art of simultaneous multiplicity. Rather than editing or curating, it embraces saturation: images, textures, and references are stacked to the point of visual breakdown. The effect mirrors the cognitive experience of The Network itself—where information, style, and identity exist in constant overlap.

The approach embodies what critics have called “visual overload as form,” using chaos as a compositional principle. Identity becomes diffuse, refracted through the medium’s own density of information.

Origins

The term and style gained prominence through the work of digital artists and critics in the early 2020s. Brian Droitcour identified schizocollage as a defining tendency linking the NFT avant-garde to earlier collage traditions—tracing it from the “cut and paste” lineage of 20th-century modernism through post-internet artists like Parker Ito and Tabor Robak, whose works fused digital accumulation with self-referential commentary on identity and medium.

Within the NFT ecosystem, these techniques were absorbed into the aesthetic logic of generative art, where algorithmic layering and recombination replaced manual collage.

Traitmaxxing

Traitmaxxing is the NFT-specific iteration of schizocollage, developed within the Avant NFT Wave through projects such as Tojiba CEO, Mifella, and Drifella. In generative NFT systems, each “trait” represents a discrete visual element—background, clothing, accessory, or expression—combined algorithmically into unique outputs. Traitmaxxing deliberately overloads this process, displaying an excessive number of traits simultaneously.

As Brian Droitcour noted, “the traits overtake the figure… digital collage stops having anything to do with expressing the self.” The resulting images verge on abstraction, transforming the technical logic of generative design into an aesthetic of self-dissolution.

Schizocollage and traitmaxxing relate to Remilia's concepts of hypercitationalism and infodensity. The same logic of compositional excess underlies Remilia’s literary experiments in Jadeposting and heavily citational projects such as Bonkler and the Everything Bonkler piece—a work displaying every Bonkler asset layer simultaneously.

See also

• Traitmaxxing
• Hypercitationalism
• Infodensity
• Schizo-aesthetics
• Jadeposting

References

• Droitcour, Brian (@briandroitcour). Twitter thread, June 12, 2024. [Direct link] | [Archived at: Internet Archive.]
• Artforum. "Cut and Paste: The Collage Impulse Today." Artforum, 2021. [[1](https://www.artforum.com/features/cut-and-paste-the-collage-impulse-today-190356)]