History
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Our project began during Fall 2001 as Lake Forest College professor Tom Denlinger had each member of his advanced photography class produce a photograph in response to a common text. After the photographs were printed, the results were distributed to members of professor Davis Schneiderman’s introductory creative writing class. Members of the class received just one photograph, and over a period of two weeks, prepared a one-page creative response to that photograph. After receiving the first set of responses, the original photographer responded to the textual response, with the original photo removed, over a shorter interval of time. The creative writing class prepared a second response within the same shortened interval. This process continued for five total exchanges, each with a shrinking interval, gradually drawing the participants ever closer in both space and time.
The Spring 2002 phase of the project moved to the Internet, with creative writing and digital imaging student’s similarly exchanging aesthetic responses. Academic Technology Specialist David Levinson facilitated a virtual "drop site" and viewing platform for the project so that the students could engage in intense aesthetic dialogue.
During both semesters of the project, the gradual collapse of distances resolved itself toward this display and celebration of the finished Corpses, but 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. In our version of the Exquisite Corpse, the body of artistic work is not merely a physical object representing the liberated desires of the participants, but a decentralized virtual object charged with contiguous meaning.
By Summer 2002, the project had expanded to three campuses; Lake Forest College welcomed Dan Raffin, assistant professor of art, and John Bickar, art department video lab supervisor, from Colorado College and Marjorie Blackwell, assistant professor of art, and Susan Savage, Web coordinator and instructional technologist from Monmouth College. Blackwell's senior art seminar class, which consisted of sculptors and painters, some of whom had little previous computer experience, added a mix of new perspectives to the project and Raffin's video class contributed an entirely new medium. Bickar oversaw the technical aspects of video inclusion and Brown brought everything together by creating the Web gallery.
Most significant to the subsequent intercampus version of the project (Spring 2003) was the concept of "de-realization." Specifically, the Corpse Working Group sought to mimic the obfuscations of the technological medium through a deliberate distortion of the participant art. The server on which the project was organized imposed CGI ("common gateway interface") protocols over the student content, changing a complete picture or video into a sampled version, or editing and rearranging texts according to certain predetermined filters.
Accordingly, students responded to the art of previous students only in de-realized form. After uploading their own contribution onto the Corpse server, their work was similarly altered for the next set of students. In this way, the Corpse was able to mimic the element of the unknown exploited by the Surrealists, while simultaneously expressing fidelity to the confusions evoked by the technological interface.
Building upon both the Spring 2003 iteration—and the feedback provided by both faculty, students, and outside reviewers—the Corpse Working Group met at Colorado College in January of 2004 to plan the Fall 2004 iteration of the project. That meeting resulted in an intense summer of programming and development, with a new database server constructed by LFC student programmer Una Novakovic. From a technological standpoint, the new Web interface is built upon a much more robust underlying framework that not only enhances the final gallery site, but also simplifies student interaction with the server.
The new database system, to be field tested in the Fall of 2004, organizes participation in the project across campuses in a manner that streamlines the submission and Gallery creation. This database automates most of the processes involved with uploading this project to the Web, gives faculty the flexibility to experiment with new manifestations of the project, and allows students to spend more time creating with less time lost to the obstructions of the previous technology. As a development in the efficiency of the project, we have moved, in a scant few months, from zeppelins to space shuttles.
A new and expanded Corpse Working Group (with added participants from Oberlin College, Kenyon College, and DePauw University) will begin work in Spring 2005, with a second iteration planned for Spring 2006. In regards to fields of academic study, this revivification of the Exquisite Corpse among six campuses (including 75 students per semester and 13 faculty and technological staff) encourages student familiarity with new media applications of modern aesthetics strategies, and will offer a number of important innovations to the Corpse workflow.
The group has already begun to reconfigure the role of the "de-realization" as a computer manifestation, and we will research possibilities of changing the nature of the "sample" that each student experiences, while moving toward a creative model that perhaps requires the direct integration of each contribution into the next in a direct, physical manner. Currently, the Corpse pieces respond to each other through metaphorical and metonymic lines, and the possibility of building these connections into the material of the contributions opens an array of new directions for the project.
The expanded iterations of the project will also seek to incorporate music and sound production in addition to the existing formats of text, video, and digital photography, and perhaps most radically, will attend to the issue of display as a function of the project. Previously, the "Gallery" model maintained the appearance of separate Corpses arranged next to each other—a logic of juxtaposition and association—and starting in Spring 2005, students and programmers from Oberlin and Kenyon will begin to develop alternative mechanisms of integrative presentation (a Gallery that flows the individual pieces into dynamic Web-based displays). To this end, these experimenters will become participants in the flow of the Corpse, in that their role will be to function as collaborators who design the Gallery display based upon the a sampling of "de-realized" pieces.
These innovations present opportunities and challenges to the expanded group, and as we begin to operate within the logistics of six autonomous campuses, the implementation and perfection of related initiative will become the primary focus of the next phases of the project.
Implementation (Timeline)
September 6, 2002: Corpse Collaborators Group organizational meeting at Lake Forest College.
September 14 - January 7, 2003: Development of comprehensive online environment ("studio"), workflow protocols, and assignment parameters.
December 16-20, 2002: Development of final "gallery" display for the corpses.
January 8, 2003: Pre-Launch, Corpse Working Group meeting at Colorado College.
January-May 2003: Corpse production (Monmouth, Lake Forest, Colorado)
Summer 2003: Preparation of Spring 2003 report; revision of Corpse work flow; discussion of "Post-Mortem" conference and future project plans.
January 2004: Corpse Working Group meets in Colorado to revise methods and plan the next iteration.
August 2004: Corpse Collaborators Group (with G reat Lakes College Association representatives from Kenyon, DePauw, and Oberlin) holds organizational meeting at Lake Forest College.
September - December 2004: Original Collaborators beta-test online environment (new database system), workflow protocols, and assignment parameters. Three-college Corpse production.
January 2005: Meeting of expanded six-college group to prepare the spring 2005 iteration.
January - March 2005: Six-college Corpse production.
August 2005: Second meeting to conduct post-mortem on Spring 2005 iteration and plan for spring 2006.
September 2005: Submit Corpse progress report on Spring 2005.
January 2006: Third meeting to prepare the Spring 2006 iteration.
August 2006: Fourth meeting to conduct post-mortem on Spring 2006 iteration and re-assess project for future direction.
September 2006: Submit Corpse progress report on Spring 2006.
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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