About The Project

Individuals at Colorado College, DePauw University, Kenyon College, Lake Forest College, Monmouth College and Oberlin College continue their ongoing adaptation of the Exquisite Corpse method as an aesthetic activity investigating connections between visual and literary texts. We have updated the surrealist game of "Cadavre Exquis" in order to discover what contemporary accidents of art might occur when students from different institutions, in different disciplines, create collaboratively and anonymously.

Goals

*     To collaborate with other institutions in a group-driven art project involving still images, text, video, and sound.
*      To expose students to a collaborative mode of kinesthetic learning. Specifically, students are both to work interdicisplinarily and through different mediums.
*      To form bonds between faculty and students at separate institutions though the use of advanced technological media.
*     To create a multimedia, web-based artwork that is beyond the scope of any one individual and reflects the collective creative impulses of several disparate but connected groups.
*     To challenge preconceived notions of art making and technology, introducing students to postmodern concepts of the de-centered subject.
*     To reinforce community-based learning through virtual technologies.
*      To form an interactive model that could be adapted to meet the pedagogical and technological needs of other institutions.

Vision: Corpse and Contiguity

This collaborative project seeks primarily to be something "to do" in the sense of being both theoretical and immanent (through its technological interface). We can discuss artistic principles with our students, and we can certainly expound upon the new media technologies that are representative of epistemological changes in the way that humans communicate—but unless we make a commitment to production literacy as a way for students to experience these ideas, our classes will remain hopelessly academic. For the faculty involved in this project—all practicing artists—the "academic" on its own can only go so far in teaching a student about making art. The challenge is to practice methodologies that are synergistic without being stultifying, and multi-sensory without being mundane. The Exquisite Corpse represents, we believe, a strong possibility of actualizing production literacy for a generation of students raised within an already heavily mediated milieu.

As such, the Corpse method, as an aesthetic activity investigating connections between visual and literary texts, draws upon Geoffrey Batchen’s notion of "contiguity" as a quality that presents "the possibility of a direct emotional empathy across an otherwise insurmountable abyss of space and time". Despite the fact that Corpse participants are separated by distance, the time of their production, and the medium of their work, the project aims to collapse space and time in a way that works with these limitations, rather than seeking to pretend such limitations are not there at all. At its thumping artificial heart, the Exquisite Corpse will trigger that same tinge of electric unconsciousness, the same excitement of juxtaposition and aleatory collision that was experienced by the Surrealist group those many decades ago. Let us briefly remark on the differences:

As the gradual collapse of distances resolves itself toward the Gallery display and of the finished Corpses, the process is meant to develop in relative isolation—an update deliberately in opposition to the original surrealist model of physical proximity in the preparation of collaborative texts. As Penelope Rosemont remarks in her description of the Chicago surrealist game Time—Travelers’ Potlatch (which provides imaginary gifts to historical figures), the "giver and (historical) receiver come together in the immediacy of a magical now, a marvelous present moment, a dreamtime concretized into perceptible reality by means of a gift" (110). In our version of the Corpse, the gift is not merely an imaginary object representing the liberated desires of the participants, but a technological object charged with contiguous meaning, cobbled together despite contemporary cultural currents that encourage fragmentation.

In order to deal explicitly with the sublimated desires and repressions that often characterize postmodern aesthetic and cultural production, this project is meant to penetrate past the boundaries that endanger the effectiveness of the close, surrealist praxis characterizing the early period Exquisite Corpse. Poet Andrei Codrescu once related to Davis Schneiderman the details of a lecture he gave in New York City that ended with poetry scrawled all over the body of a naked volunteer. While we consider this type of group creativity delightful, Codrescu’s ability to even temporarily locate the postmodern body was a fortuitously uncommon event.

This project details the necessity of undermining elements of a culture that deliberately disembodies the viewer and consumer. Thus, we acknowledge the cultural barriers between the vision of modernity and the space of the contemporary. This update of the Exquisite Corpse unleashes an engine of surrealist activity capable of subverting the dislocations of contemporary culture while emphasizing the possibilities of emancipatory intervention.

What this all means in the language of the everyday, is that since the Surrealists tapped successfully into the fragmentation of their historical period (marked, as it was, by world wars and revolution), so too does our update respond to a period of increased fragmentation. We seek to demonstrate that all artistic products will be distorted in some way, whether by the viewer or the marketplace that authorizes the gaze of the viewer—and that to find contiguity in an age of the discontinuous, the answer is to both approach the problem directly and make it part of the process of creation.

With these principles in mind, we hope to develop the Corpse in a way that best attends to the development of student experimentation, while at the same time building a sense of community born from an even greater sense of isolation.

Batchen, Geoffrey. "Carnal Knowledge." Art Journal 60 (2001): 21-23.

Rosemont, Penelope. Surrealist Experiences: 1001 Dawns, 221 Midnight. Surrealist Editions. Chicago: Black Swan Press, 2000.

Links to Exquisite Corpse Information:

* Our Spring 2003 Exquisite Corpse Project
* ExquisiteCorpse.com
* How to create an Exquisite Corpse

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Exquisite Corpse Project—A collaboration on the creation of multimedia works of art among undergraduate students from Colorado College, DePauw University, Kenyon College, Lake Forest College, Monmouth College, and Oberlin College.

Sponsored by the Midwest Instructional Technology Center, with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Copyright 2004—All Rights Reserved