Read from the Foreword of The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism's Parlor Gameedited by Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Davis Schneiderman, and Tom Denlinger:
"I. Fold, crease, filter
Database aesthetics, collaborative filtering, musical riddles, and beat sequence philosophies don’t exactly spring to mind when you think of the concept of the Exquisite Corpse. But if there’s one thing that I want to you to think about when you read this anthology, it’s that collage-based art—whether sound, film, multimedia, or computer code—has become the basic reference frame for most of generation info. We live in a world of relentlessly expanding networks—cellular, wireless, fiber optic routed . . . you name it. This world is becoming more interconnected than ever before, and it’s going to get deeper, weirder, and a lot more interesting than even the data-stream-driven moment of this writing (NYC, at the beginning of the twenty-first century).
In an increasingly fractured and borderless world, we have fewer and fewer fixed systems to actually measure our experiences. This begs the question: how did we compare experiences before the Internet? How did people simply say “this is the way I see it”? They didn’t. There was no one way of seeing anything, and if there’s one thing the twentieth century taught us, it is that we have to give up the idea of mono-focused media, and enjoy the mesmerizing flow of fragments. And for the info obsessed, games are the best shock absorber for the “new”—they render it in terms that everyone can get. Play a video game. Stroll through a corridor. Blast your opponents. Move to the next level. Repeat.
Or put away the carnage and imagine a westernized version of a game that another culture uses to teach about morals, demonstrating that respect for life begins with an ability to grasp the flow of information between people and places. I wonder how many westerners would know the term “daspada”—but wait. Evolving different behavioral models to respond to changing environments becomes a site where complexity meets empathy, a locus where we learn that giving information and receiving it is just part of what it means to live on this or probably any planet in the universe. And so what makes the Exquisite Corpse cool is simple: it was an artists’ parlor game that exposed its participants to a dynamic process—making the creative act a symbolic exchange between players."
To read a longer excerpt or to request to be notified when The Exquisite Corpse becomes available, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Exquisite-Corpse,674153.aspx.
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