In the music industry, sampling is the use of existing, often disparate, audio content that is assembled, looped, and layered to create new arrangements. This practice is notoriously linked to 1980s and 1990s hip-hop music, as members of this genre unapologetically remixed audio clips and challenged copyright ownership. Similarly, twentieth-century collage artists appropriated and juxtaposed heterogeneous visual content, celebrating distinctions between those fragments through legible and tangible characteristics including edge, material, and color palette. Contemporary visual (that is, digital) sampling, fueled by resources such as Google Images and Adobe Photoshop, allows the development of a composite image where distinctions between sampled clips are intentionally obscured and oftentimes difficult to distinguish.

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