Our first public presentation and experiment (March 19 2010) was reasonably successful. Aside from a few technical problems and issues with access to the stories, the event went well. In the first story, on the theme of “sustainable immobility”, 13 people participated. In the second, with no fixed theme, 14 people participated. The stories are posted below. It is now our mission to improve on this event by ironing out technical problems and making remote online access to the event simpler. We will perform a series of experiments as part of “La Noche de los Libros,” Madrid on 23rd April, 2010. This event will also take the form of an exhibition, given that the multiple stories in evolution at any one time will be presented on a series of large screens.
A video of the presentation given at the outset (about the artistic and scientific ideas behind Riverrun and how it works as an interdisciplinary experiment) can be found here: http://www.electrosmogfestival.net/documentation/
We are pleased to announce that Riverrun, the collective story-telling Exquisite and Emergent Corpse, will be presented as a series of international online and local experiments at Medialab Prado, Madrid on 18th March 2010, from 6 to 9 pm, as part of the Electrosmog Festival.
These experiments will take place in both English and Spanish. Details of the programme, which include talks by Kevin McCourt and theoretical physicist Bartolo Luque, can be found here.
We are currently in the test phase of Riverrun. Students from the Universidad Politécnica, Madrid, are writing collective stories to test the program developed by Pablo Villalba. This will be presented in public very shortly. Further news will be available soon.
The programming for the pictorial Exquisite and Emergent Corpse is being carried out by a team comprising Charles Santana, Alex Santana and Luiz Otávio.
From the Exquisite Corpse to the Exquisite and Emergent Corpse
Exquisite Corpse (from the French cadavre exquis)
“A game of folded paper in which a sentence or a drawing is composed by several players, each unaware of the preceding collaboration or collaborations. The now classic example, which gives the game its name, is one of the first sentences which was produced in this way “the exquisite/corpse/will drink/the new/wine.” (André Breton, Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme) [1]
This project has been developed by Kevin McCourt, artist and Bartolo Luque, theoretical physicist.
This practical experiment will focus on social interaction, with more than a hundred creators collaborating in the making of two collective works: One a story, the other a picture. Each person will participate, using their own computer (client), by designing a small part of the collective work which will be housed in a central computer (server).
The projects will address how we are influenced by others as we form and communicate across networks.
They will allow us to also explore relationships between scientific (Physics) techniques for understanding collective human behaviour and philosophical and psychological concepts related to individual experience, sensation and perception which form part of such social phenomena.
This blog introduces a series of collaborative projects with Bartolo Luque, a theoretical physicist. We plan to present interactive artistic projects and participative interventions which explore relationships between scientific (Physics) understanding of collective human behaviour and philosophical concepts concerned with individual experience, sensation and perception which form part of such social phenomena.
Our practical experiments will focus on social interaction in public places. They will be designed to permit the emergence of heterogeneous, idiosyncratic, anomalous, or shared behaviours, within and across different culturally specific contexts and in pan-cultural contexts such as the internet.
