{"id":111,"date":"2009-01-31T02:46:03","date_gmt":"2009-01-31T00:46:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kmccourt.wordpress.com\/2009\/01\/30\/blog-entry-dated-30012009-1923\/"},"modified":"2022-11-30T13:22:44","modified_gmt":"2022-11-30T13:22:44","slug":"from-the-exquisite-corpse-to-the-exquisite-and-emergent-corpse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kmccourt.org\/blog\/from-the-exquisite-corpse-to-the-exquisite-and-emergent-corpse\/","title":{"rendered":"One history: From the Exquisite Corpse to the Exquisite and Emergent Corpse"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

<\/a>From the Exquisite Corpse<\/em> to the Exquisite and Emergent Corpse<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Exquisite Corpse<\/em><\/strong> (from the French cadavre exquis<\/em>) <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

“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.” (Andr\u00e9 Breton, Dictionnaire abr\u00e9g\u00e9 du surr\u00e9alisme) <\/em>[1]<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The creative method known as the Exquisite Corpse<\/em> was invented by the Surrealists Marcel Duhamel, Jacques Pr\u00e9vert and Yves Tanguy in 1925.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The game has its origin in the parlour game \u201cconsequences\u201d in which players take turns to write on a sheet of paper, doubling it so that what they have written cannot be seen, then passing it on to the next player to add their contribution. In a similar fashion, the Exquisite Corpse<\/em> is played by a group of people who write or draw a composition in sequence<\/strong>. Each participant can only see the very last part, letter or word of what the previous player has written or drawn. This acts as a register or a new starting point for the person about to draw or write.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the case of writing, a grammatical structure is decided beforehand, for example: “The adjective<\/em> noun<\/em> adverb<\/em> verb<\/em> the adjective<\/em> noun.<\/em>” However, nothing is decided beforehand regarding theme. Early examples of sentences written by the Surrealists using this technique include:<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The dormitory of friable little girls puts the odious box right.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Senegal oyster will eat the tricolour bread.” [2]<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The completely black light lays down day and night the powerless suspension to do any good.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The anaemic young girl got the waxed mannequins turned red.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Monsieur Poincar\u00e9, if you want, kisses on the mouth, with a peacock feather, in an ardour I never saw before, the late Monsieur de Borniol.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The made-up shrimp hardly enlightens some double kisses.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rue Mouffetard, love-shivering, amuses the chimera who shoots at us.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The very moved Pathos, thanks singing the bullet of chopped vetiver between Line and Pr\u00e2line.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Caraco is a beautiful whore: lazy as a doormouse and glass-gloved for doing nothing, she strings pearls with the turkeys of the farce.” [3]<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The technique was adapted to drawing by this Surrealist group. [4]<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inspiration for developing the Exquisite Corpse<\/em> as a drawing or collage technique perhaps came from popular interactive children\u2019s books, whose full-page illustrations of people or animals were horizontally divided into three hinged parts. The first part included the head, the second the torso, and the last, the legs. This design enabled the child to flick through and select from a range of body parts and thus compose fantastical hybrid creatures.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The following examples [4] of drawings were realised in 1927 by Andr\u00e9 Breton, Goemans Camille, Jacques Pr\u00e9vert and Yves Tanguy:<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

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\"\"\/<\/figure><\/div>\n\n
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\"\"\/<\/figure><\/div>\n\n
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\"\"\/<\/figure><\/div>\n\n
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\"\"\/<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

 The following drawing was produced by Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, Juan Miro and Max Morise in 1928 [5]:<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

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In these cases, it is clear that the contributors evidently came to a vague agreement beforehand on the general theme.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is how the game has continued to be played until now. The monster theme in the example below, created in 2005, was surely also decided at the outset [6]:<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

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<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In publications of the late 1920s, Robert Desnos, Paul Eluard, Andr\u00e9 Breton and Tristan Tzara, as well as some other critics and artists, argued that creative practice, especially poetic works, ought to be anonymous, collective, intuitive, spontaneous, playful and as automatic as possible.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The poet Nicolas Calas sustained that the use of techniques like the Exquisite Corpse<\/em> laid bare the “unconscious reality in the personality of the group,” [2] that is to say, the non-verbal psychological character of the anxieties, fears and desires of its members in relation to the affective dynamics taking place within it.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Max Ernst called the process \u201ca mental contagion\u201d [7] He believed the Exquisite Corpse<\/em>, analysed after the event as a completed work, could tell us much about the creative and intellectual kinship of the group which created it. To my mind, this would imply that the latent cognitive processes of concept formation and knowledge development such creative collaborations involve are examples of emergent behaviour.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Across Art Forms<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A modified version of Exquisite Corpse<\/em> technique was applied to novel writing by the members of the Detective Club [8] in 1931. Fourteen authors, in this case having read the content of previous chapters, wrote a murder story, The Floating Admiral<\/em>. They wrote each chapter sequentially as individuals and without direction. Each writer also wrote their solution to the murder mystery and placed this in a sealed envelope. The envelopes were not opened until completion of the final chapter\u2019s denouement by Anthony Berkeley. All the other authors\u2019 solutions were included in the final publication as appendices.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Composers Virgil Thomson, John Cage, Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison often collaborated on Exquisite Corpse <\/em>musical pieces in the mid 1940s. As Don Gillespie, a colleague of Lou Harrison explains [9]:<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

“One composer would write a bar of music, and the next, without seeing that measure, would continue with another measure, and so on until the piece ended. From the surviving sketches that Lou (Harrison) saved, Robert Hughes had arranged twenty of these pieces for flute, clarinet, bassoon, horn, and piano.<\/span>” [10]<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

“For a cover, the designer Pamela Tucker (in 1982) had the idea of asking the three still living composers (Virgil, John, and Lou) to use the same game procedure for the publication’s cover drawing and for its end-piece.\u201d [10]<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two collections of dark and mysterious short stories, Exquis Cadavres,<\/em> published by radio presenter Brigitte Kernel in 2001 and 2002 [11], were written by her and listeners during a radio program, Noctiluque<\/em> on the France Inter channel.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 1984 movie Anijam<\/em> directed by Marv Newland, which follows the adventures of a cartoon character called Foska, features the work of 22 independent and geographically dispersed animators on a filmic Exquisite Corpse<\/em>. That is to say, each animator received only the last frame of the previous animator\u2019s contribution. They had no further knowledge of the content of previous contributions and did not know where their effort was due to be placed in the final film sequence. [12] [13]<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interactivity and Interaction<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Exquisite Corpses <\/em>above, clearly defined and subsequently unchanged contributions were simply added, in linear fashion, to the empty space at the end of the previously completed part of the sequence. This classic technique has become popular on the internet. [14] However, the technique can be adapted to involve a more interactive creative process, where each contribution relates to a number of earlier contributions. The process may involve, for example, the altering of previously submitted work. A more developed collaborative relationship may therefore be established between participants.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such modified versions of the technique have often been played across conventional postal or email networks and internet forums as a form of mail art, where those involved add to or adapt an existing drawing, collage, textual or musical work. [15]<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photoshop<\/em> or Layer Tennis <\/em>[16] [17] is another popular example <\/span>of such a collaboration which uses the internet, although in this case the process is between only two players and expressly competitive, with the declared winner being the one deemed by a judge to have made the best alterations to the image.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Mysterious Object at Noon<\/em> [18] [19], Apichatpong Weerasethakul employed a similar hybrid of the sequential and \u201cadditive\/subtractive\u201d approach in the making of a film, part documentary and part fiction, about the unrelated lives of people of varied social status living in different parts of Thailand.  They were asked to contribute to a story begun by earlier participants. They could say whatever they liked and could even rewind to any point in the story developed so far, in order to change it or simply start their own story from any point they felt more appropriate. The result became the basis for a film script which was then produced as a drama and released in 2000.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interaction and the Internet: The Exquisite and Emergent Corpse<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Exquisite and Emergent Corpse<\/em>, a creative event brings real space and communication flows on the internet into the same affective environment. In its use of these technologies it is conspicuously contemporary, since it reflects how the internet and communication technologies have revolutionised how we interact, share information, construct our awareness of the world or simply live and play.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a more general sense, it seeks to make visually explicit the role of interaction<\/em> in relation to the influence others have upon us. It emphasises that the multimedia online environment is a mise en sc\u00e8ne<\/em> of collective action. We need only think of the widespread use of blogs, wikis and the scores of online social interaction tools on the internet. [20]<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Decisions are made and seen by group members in real time. This is the first major difference from the projects previously introduced. What one or several participants do immediately influences what another does. As interactions occur and participants make these decisions, non-participants can immediately see how the whole picture or story is changing as a result. Patterns of interaction, should they occur, are perceptible.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In order to give further insight into the aims of this project and how its structure reflects them, it might be helpful to compare the Exquisite and Emergent Corpse<\/em> to another public artwork which, at first glance, seems very similar.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Open Burble<\/em> [21] was implemented by Haque Design and Research at the Singapore Biennale in 2006 and in London on the evening of September 16, 2007.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

“The Burble<\/em> is a massive structure reaching up towards the sky, composed of approximately 1000 extra-large helium balloons each of which contains microcontrollers and LEDs that create spectacular patterns of light across the surface of the structure. The public, both audience and performer, come together to control this immense rippling, glowing, bustling ‘Burble’ that sways in the evening sky, in response to movements of the long articulated interactive handle bar at the base of the structure.” [22]<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As with the Exquisite and Emergent Corpse<\/em>, this work is interactive and collaborative, with each individual contributing to the whole. We might assume that participants cannot see the whole work, but only that part near them, at least until the Burble<\/em> is high in the air.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

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Burble London, Holland Park, 2007 (photos by Wang Wei) [21]<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The movements, caused by the actions of participants imply a conscious choice with regard to determining the movement and form of the Burble<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The Burble<\/em> is held down to the ground by the combined weight of the crowds holding on to the handle bar. They may position it as they like. They may curve in on themselves, or pull it in a straight line.” [22]<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The patterns of colours echo their movements.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

“As people on the ground shake and pump the handle bars of the Burble<\/em>, they see their movements echoed as colours through the entire system.” [22]<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

While participants know that movements will change the colour patterns, and they may indeed move in order to effect or see such changes, they themselves do not directly determine the colours or colour combinations. Rather these colour patterns change automatically according to the form which emerges. So, through collective movement, push and pull, they directly influence the form and only indirectly the colour.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

An important difference between The Burble<\/em> and our project is that, in the former, individuals do not control a defined or definable area. Together, participants occupy the perimeter and push and pull on the circumference of the structure. This makes part of the whole rise and fall. However, since the change effected will depend on the cumulative force used by a number of people involved in the push and pull action, the effect on one particular part cannot be clearly assigned to any one individual.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Indeed, if a participant doesn\u2019t convince others to collaborate, or simply take them along with an enthusiastic push or pull, it is unlikely that the Burble<\/em> would change as he or she wishes.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

A major aim of our project is to analyse retrospectively the decisions made by each participant. In the Exquisite and Emergent Corpse, <\/em>the changes each individual makes are both identifiable and the influence they have on others is more subtle. Furthermore, the visualisations and server data collected will enable us to retrace the steps, paths and patterns followed by both individual and groups.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s consider further the advantages of the Exquisite and Emergent Corpse<\/em> with regard to the stated desire to retrospectively analyse both<\/strong> individual experience and collective behaviour:<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n