Our collaborative Exquisite Collaboration project is online! Here is the link; feel free to post to Facebook or wherever you like.

The final conglomeration looks great, although it definitely has a creepy side and I’m not sure I would want to run into it in a dark alley. Everyone put a lot of effort into this project – thanks for all your hard work! Everyone’s names are listed at the bottom of the page. If you hover the mouse over a head, body or legs segment, a little tooltip will let you know whose work it is.

During this class, we looked at the origins of the exquisite corpse collaborative drawing game, including some of the original Surrealist drawings. The Surrealists were particularly interested in the subconscious, and came up with many techniques of exploring subconscious thought, including automatic writing, the cut-up technique, frottage, and collage. Wikipedia has a great list of Surrealist techniques. Think about how some of the commands and tools we use on our computers reflect the avant-garde strategies of collage and collaboration:

“Avant-garde aesthetic strategies became embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software. The avant-garde became materialized in a computer. Digital cinema technology is a case in point. The avant-garde strategy of collage reemerged as a “cut and paste” command, the most basic operation one can perform on digital data. The idea of painting on film became embedded in paint functions of film editing software. The avant-garde move to combine animation, printed texts and live action footage is repeated in the convergence of animation, title generation, paint, compositing and editing systems into single all-in-one packages.” – Lev Manovich, from The Language of New Media

We also looked at some examples of how the exquisite corpse technique has been adapted for new media and the web:

• Corpsify
• A “Photoshop Tennis” variant
• The Exquisite Book (the “Preview & Process” page has great examples of SketchUp use)
• Monoface
• SITO’s Gridcosm and HyGrid

Besides Corpsify, here are some other examples of web-based collaborative drawing tools:

• Flockdraw
• WebCanvas
• SwarmSketch
• Scriblink

Finally, we created some paper exquisite corpse drawings in class, and I demonstrated how to go about slicing a Photoshop animation into three smaller ‘head’, ‘body’, and ‘feet’ animations for our exquisite corpse project. If you’d like to read more about collaboration on the web, check out Vague Terrain 17: Collaborative Spaces.

After our critique, I handed out Assignment 2, the Exquisite Collaboration project. For this project you’ll each create several animated GIF images, which we’ll combine into an interactive, animated “exquisite corpse”. To get an idea of how the final project will work, check out the Exquisite Collaboration from last year’s class.

Remember, in the spirit of the original Surrealists’ drawing game, your ‘head’ images don’t have to be heads; your ‘feet’ could be tails, clouds, flowerpots, or anything you wish. Your images can be either drawings or photo-based or some combination of both.

The project requires you to create six animated GIFs, each 500 pixels wide x 250 pixels high. You might find it easier to work on two 500 x 750 pixel images, and then crop each into 3 images. Don’t forget about the two 500 x 750 background images as well – these don’t have to be animated. The animations for this project should be short loops, they do not have to be particularly complex. You are welcome to make extra images if you find time!

If you each make 8 images, how many possible combinations will the creature have? The time-based nature of animation adds additional variation and complexity – animations with different frame rates will not always line up the same way.

“Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.” – Italo Calvino, from Six Memos for the Next Millennium