Academic literature on the topic 'Exquisite corpse (Game)'

Horses gallop, birds fly, architects draw. Learning design through drawing has been, and continues to be, the most fundamental method of studying architecture. With drawing literacy in decline since the late 1990s, both supporters and skeptics have declared the “Death of Drawing”, pitting digital against hand drawing. Given this situation, what are the functions of architectural drawing today, particularly those that can enable learning? This article discusses a pedagogical method that aims to cultivate a student’s desire and competency to collaborate through an inclusive drawing process. This approach draws inspiration from a long history of precedents, from handscroll paintings of the Qing-dynasty to Modern experiments of “exquisite corpse,” the drawing game of “Dot-the-Dot” by the Texas Rangers, and the contemporary drawing practices of David Gersten, Carol Arches, and Momoyo Kaijima.

This article shares and reflects on Underwater Haiku Exquisite Corpse – a playful approach to writing and enquiry about rivers and their underwater environments. The Underwater Haiku Exquisite Corpse was an adaptation of the Surrealist exquisite corpse concept – a collaborative game in which each participant wrote or drew in response to a prompt and kept their contribution concealed until the end, when the full corpse was revealed to all contributors. We consider how our approach to exquisite corpse fostered playful co-creation and community and contributed to better understanding people’s experiences with and intuitive responses to river environments. This article blends academic writing and found poems (existing words or phrases reframed into a poem) from Underwater Haiku Exquisite Corpse, in response to calls for more creative and entangled ways to write about the world. We applied this technique, using lines of text by different Underwater Haiku Exquisite Corpse contributors and reordering lines into poems that illustrated how contributors intertwined notions of humans, rivers, and what lies below the surface. We hope that by sharing our experiences with the Underwater Haiku Exquisite Corpse, we encourage more playful approaches to geopoetics, to foster conversations across disciplines, as well as within and outside the academy.

Emerald Transmutations is an experiment in digital alchemy inspired by the surrealist parlour game Exquisite Corpse and by the Emerald Tablets, the foundational hermetic text in Western alchemy. Starting with the “prima materia” of two scenes from celluloid film history, each transmuted scene was passed along between seven “digital alchemists” who each performed a process of transmutation on the material in an attempt to turn base metal into gold and to find “the philosopher’s stone."

The emergence in 2022 of surreal and grotesque image sets created using the free online AI text-to-image generator DALL-E Mini (Craiyon) prompts our analysis of their aesthetic content and connections to preexisting media forms and trends in digital culture. DALL-E Mini uses an unfiltered database of images from the internet to create new images based on a user’s text prompt, often resulting in misshapen bodies and impossible scenarios. Despite its technological limitations, DALL-E Mini’s popularity as a meme-making tool is visible on social media platforms, where crowd-sourced images are shared and experimentation with the tool is encouraged. Through comparison with existing artistic practices and formats (creative automata, surrealism, body horror, celebrity memes), we argue that DALL-E Mini creations can be understood as human-AI co-creations and forms of aesthetic mimicry. Building on the ideas of surrealists such as André Breton, we propose that DALL-E Mini’s images, prompts and the grid interface adhere to surrealism’s historical interests in the unconscious, the uncanny, and the collaborative ‘exquisite corpse’ parlour game. We also consider DALL-E Mini’s relevance to the category of ‘AI Arts’, Patricia De Vries’s call for more research that relates algorithms to the broader artistic and cultural contexts in which they are embedded (2020), and the ‘authoring’ of celebrity bodies as data (Kanai, 2016). Our theorisation of DALL-E Mini is supported by examples drawn from social media and personal experiments with the generator. Overall, we propose that internet users’ experimentation with DALL-E Mini corresponds with a cultural moment in which AI imaging technologies are eliciting excitement and anxiety. The outputs are revealed to be reliant on users’ pop cultural knowledge, with DALL-E Mini allowing for a playful, co-creative algorithmic practice, wherein contemporary anxieties about digital labour, (post)digital culture, biopolitics, and global issues are redirected into surreal visual storyworlds.

Background information Sandscript was programmed with the web application « Tchat-scene », created by Carol-Ann Braun and the computer services company Timsoft (). It organizes a data-base of raw material into compositions and sequences allowing to build larger episodes. Multimedia resources are thus attributed to frames surrounding the chat space or to the chat space itself, thus “augmented” to include pre-written texts and graphics. Sandscript works best on a PC, with Internet Explorer. On Mac, use 0S9 and Internet Explorer. You will have to download a chat application for the site to function. Coded conversation General opinion would have it that chat space is a conversational space, facilitating rather than complicating communication. Writing in a chat space is very much influenced by the current ideological stance which sees collaborative spaces as places to make friends, speak freely, flip from one “channel” to another, link with a simple click into related themes, etc. Moreover, chat users tend to think of the chat screen in terms of a white page, an essentially neutral environment. A quick analysis of chat practices reveals a different scenario: chat spaces are highly coded typographical writing spaces, quick to exclude those who don’t abide by the technical and procedural constraints associated with computer reading/writing tools (Despret-Lonné, Gentès). Chatters seek to belong to a “community;” conversely, every chat has “codes” which restrict its membership to the like-minded. The patterns of exchange characteristic of chats are phatic (Jakobson), and their primary purpose is to get and maintain a social link. It is no surprise then that chatters should emphasize two skills: one related to rhetorical ingenuity, the other to dexterity and speed of writing. To belong, one first has to grasp the banter, then manage very quickly the rules and rituals of the group, then answer by mastering the intricacies of the keyboard and its shortcuts. Speed is compulsory if your answers are to follow the communal chat; as a result, sentences tend to be very short, truncated bits, dispatched in a continuous flow. Sandscript attempts to play with the limits of this often hermetic writing process (and the underlying questions of affinity, participation and reciprocity). It opens up a social space to an artistic and fictional space, each with rules of its own. Hyper-linked dialogue Sandscript is not just about people chatting, it is also about influencing the course of these exchanges. The site weaves pre-scripted poetic content into the spontaneous, real-time dialogue of chatters. Smileys and the plethora of abbreviations, punctuations and icons characteristic of chat rooms are mixed in with typographical games that develop the idea of text as image and text as sound — using Morse Code to make text resonate, CB code to evoke its spoken use, and graphic elements within the chat space itself to oppose keyboard text and handwritten graffiti. The web site encourages chatters to broaden the scope of their “net-speak,” and take a playfully conscious stance towards their own familiar practices. Actually, most of the writing in this web-site is buried in the database. Two hundred or so “key words” — expressions typical of phatic exchanges, in addition to other words linked to the idea of sandstorms and archeology — lie dormant, inactive and unseen until a chatter inadvertently types one in. These keywords bridge the gap between spontaneous exchange and multimedia content: if someone types in “hi,” an image of a face, half buried in sand, pops up in a floating window and welcomes you, silently; if someone types in the word “wind,” a typewritten “wind” floats out into the graphic environment and oscillates between the left and right edges of the frames; typing the word “no” “magically” triggers the intervention of an anarchist who says something provocative*. *Sandscript works like a game of ping-pong among chatters who are intermittently surprised by a comment “out of nowhere.” The chat space, augmented by a database, forms an ever-evolving, fluid “back-bone” around which artistic content is articulated. Present in the form of programs who participate in their stead, artists share the spot light, adding another level of mediation to a collective writing process. Individual and collective identities Not only does Sandscript accentuate the multimedia aspects of typed chat dialogues, it also seeks to give a “ shape” to the community of assembled chatters. This shape is musical: along with typing in a nickname of her choice, each chatter is attributed a sound. Like crickets in a field, each sound adds to the next to create a collective presence, modified with every new arrival and departure. For example, if your nick is “yoyo-mama,” your presence will be associated with a low, electronic purr. When “pillX” shows up, his nick will be associated with a sharp violin chord. When “mojo” pitches in, she adds her sound profile to the lot, and the overall environment changes again. Chatters can’t hear the clatter of each other’s keyboards, but they hear the different rhythms of their musical identities. The repeated pings of people present in the same “scape” reinforce the idea of community in a world where everything typed is swept away by the next bit of text, soon to be pushed off-screen in turn. The nature of this orchestrated collective presence is determined by the artists and their programs, not by the chatters themselves, whose freedom is limited to switching from one nick to another to test the various sounds associated with each. Here, identity is both given and built, both individual and collective, both a matter of choice and pre-defined rules. (Goffman) Real or fictitious characters The authors introduce simulated bits of dialogue within the flow of written conversation. Some of these fake dialogues simply echo whatever keywords chatters might type. Others, however, point else where, suggesting a hyper-link to a more elaborate fictionalized drama among “characters.” Sandscript also hides a plot. Once chatters realize that there are strange goings on in their midst, they become caught in the shifting sands of this web site’s inherent duality. They can completely lose their footing: not only do they have to position themselves in relation to other, real people (however disguised…) but they also have to find their bearings in the midst of a database of fake interlocutors. Not only are they expected to “write” in order to belong, they are also expected to unearth content in order to be “in the know.” A hybridized writing is required to maintain this ambivalence in place. Sandscript’s fake dialogue straddles two worlds: it melds in with the real-time small talk of chatters all while pointing to elements in a fictional narrative. For example, “mojo” will say: “silting up here ”, and “zano” will answer “10-4, what now? ” These two characters could be banal chatters, inviting others to join in their sarcastic banter… But they are also specifically referring to incidents in their fictional world. The “chat code” not only addresses its audience, it implies that something else is going on that merits a “click” or a question. “Clicking” at this juncture means more than just quickly responding to what another chatter might have typed. It implies stopping the banter and delving into the details of a character developed at greater length elsewhere. Indeed, in Sandscript, each fictional dialogue is linked to a blog that reinforces each character’s personality traits and provides insights into the web-site’s wind-swept, self-erasing world. Interestingly enough, Sandscript then reverses this movement towards a closed fictional space by having each character not only write about himself, but relate her immediate preoccupations to the larger world. Each blog entry mentions a character’s favorite URL at that particular moment. One character might evoke a web site about romantic poetry, another one on anarchist political theory, a third a web-site on Morse code, etc… Chatters click on the URL and open up an entirely new web-site, directly related to the questions being discussed in Sandscript. Thus, each character represents himself as well as a point of view on the larger world of the web. Fiction opens onto a “real” slice of cyber-space and the work of other authors and programmers. Sandscript mixes up different types of on-line identities, emphasizing that representations of people on the web are neither “true” nor “false.” They are simply artificial and staged, simple facets of identities which shift in style and rhetoric depending on the platform available to them. Again, identity is both closed by our social integration and opened to singular “play.” Conclusion: looking at and looking through One could argue that since the futurists staged their “electrical theater” in the streets of Turin close to a hundred years ago, artists have worked on the blurry edge between recognizable formal structures and their dissolution into life itself. And after a century of avant-gardes, self-referential appropriations of mass media are also second nature. Juxtaposing one “use” along another reveals how different frames of reference include or exclude each other in unexpected ways. For the past twenty years much artwork has which fallen in between genres, and most recently in the realm of what Nicolas Bourriaud calls “relational aesthetics.” Such work is designed not only to draw attention to itself but also to the spectator’s relation to it and the broader artistic context which infuses the work with additional meaning. By having dialogue serve as a hyper-link to multimedia content, Sandscript, however, does more. Even though some changes in the web site are pre-programmed to occur automatically, not much happens without the chatters, who occupy center-stage and trigger the appearance of a latent content. Chatters are the driving force, they are the ones who make text appear and flow off-screen, who explore links, who exchange information, and who decide what pops up and doesn’t. Here, the art “object” reveals its different facets around a multi-layered, on-going conversation, subjected to the “flux” of an un-formulated present. Secondly, Sandscript demands that we constantly vary our posture towards the work: getting involved in conversation to look through the device, all while taking some distance to consider the object and look at its content and artistic “mediations.” (Bolster and Grusin, Manovitch). This tension is at the heart of Sandscript, which insists on being both a communication device “transparent” to its user, and an artistic device that imposes an opaque and reflexive quality. The former is supposed to disappear behind its task; the latter attracts the viewer’s attention over and over again, ever open to new interpretations. This approach is not without pitfalls. One Sandscript chatter wondered if as the authors of the web-site were not disappointed when conversation took the upper hand, and chatters ignored the graphics. On the other hand, the web site’s explicit status as a chat space was quickly compromised when users stopped being interested in each other and turned to explore the different layers hidden within the interface. In the end, Sandscript chatters are not bound to any single one of these modes. They can experience one and then other, and —why not —both simultaneously. This hybrid posture brings to mind Herman’s metaphor of a door that cannot be closed entirely: “la porte joue” —the door “gives.” It is not perfectly fitted and closed — there is room for “play.” Such openness requires that the artistic device provide two seemingly contradictory ways of relating to it: a desire to communicate seamlessly all while being fascinated by every seam in the representational space projected on-screen. Sandscript is supposed to “run” and “not run” at the same time; it exemplifies the technico-semiotic logic of speed and resists it full stop. Here, openness is not ontological; it is experiential, shifting. About the Authors Carol-Ann Braun is multimedia artist, at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecomunications, Paris, France. EmaiL: carol-ann.braun@wanadoo.fr Annie Gentes is media theorist and professor at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecomunications, Paris, France. Email: Annie.Gentes@enst.fr Works Cited Adamowicz, Elza. Surrealist Collage in Text and Image, Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Augé, Marc. Non-lieux, Introduction à une Anthropologie de la Surmodernité. Paris: Seuil, 1992. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation, Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. Bourriaud, Nicholas. Esthétique Relationnelle. Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 1998. Despret-Lonnet, Marie and Annie Gentes, Lire, Ecrire, Réécrire. Paris: Bibliothèque Centre Pompidou, 2003. Goffman, Irving. Interaction Ritual. New York: Pantheon, 1967. Habermas, Jürgen. Théorie de l’Agir Communicationnel, Vol.1. Paris: Fayard, 1987. Herman, Jacques. “Jeux et Rationalité.” Encyclopedia Universalis, 1997. Jakobson, Roman.“Linguistics and Poetics: Closing statements,” in Thomas Sebeok. Style in Language. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960. Latzko-Toth, Guillaume. “L’Internet Relay Chat, Un Cas Exemplaire de Dispositif Socio-technique,” in Composite. Montreal: Université du Québec à Montréal, 2001. Lyotard, Jean-François. La Condition Post-Moderne. Paris: les Editions de Minuit, 1979. Manovitch, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. Michaud, Yves. L’Art à l’Etat Gazeux. Essai sur le Triomphe de l’Esthétique, Les essais. Paris: Stock, 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Braun, Carol-Ann & Gentes, Annie. "Dialogue: a hyper-link to multimedia content." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/05_Braun-Gentes.php>. APA Style Braun, C. & Gentes, A. (2004, Jul1). Dialogue: a hyper-link to multimedia content.. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/05_Braun-Gentes.php>

Birdcage | Gramophone Feather | Listen Hand is a surrealist inspired, digital collage. This work investigates our innate human ability to find connections from seemingly unconnected themes, addressing concepts of freedom, empathy, and vulnerability. A predominantly monochromatic colour palette evokes feelings of nostalgia, yet the pastel pink typography, (a homage to the surrealist parlour game, the exquisite corpse whereby 3 ideas are combined) suggests an outlook towards serendipitous connection.

This chapter travels the path of the suicide victim from live body to corpse to cadaver of the suicide victim. Some suicides undertook elaborate measures to prepare their bodies for death. Women, in particular, donned their finest clothing and coiffed their hair. A few of them were determined to leave behind an exquisite corpse. Reporters and medical investigators had the first access to corpses at the scenes of death. Next, police station officials transferred the corpse to the Hospital Juárez for autopsy, and it essentially became a cadaver for scientific inquiry. Finally it the corpsefound its resting place in one of the many modern cemeteries or ossuaries that skirted the city. The analysis draws on forensic reports, newspaper reportage, visual sources, and popular culture to examine the scopophilic gaze directed at the female body. Officials read the suicidal body like a text and imbued it with multiple meanings informed by gender and class ideologies.

What is the function of architectural drawings, those drawn by architecture students that are conducive to learning? This paper discusses a pedagogical experiment generated from a series of collaborative drawings. The end goal seeks for a new agency, through a didactic platform and process exploring the visuality of the productive observation instead of the optical graphics of realism. Through the intermediary of the drawing in the present, the retrospective and prospective character of the design process can be explored. By reintroducing draw¬ing as a medium of thought, its power to project a clear and intentional inquiry can be revealed. Inspired by the Chinese scroll painting and the spirit of public drawing from the west, Exquisite Scroll is a collaborative hand-drawing exercise with a working method akin to the Surrealist game exquisite corpse. It is corporeal in nature and requires intellectual exchange between a multiplicity of authors. It is a negotiated act showing beyond what is observed. The thematic topics of urban historiography and architectural conservation are further explored through a ‘multi-temporal’ perspective, to look into the past and future in both space and time.