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Exquisite Corpse
This nOde last updated May 7th, 2003 and is permanently morphing...
(11 K'an (Corn) / 12 Uo - 24/260 - 12.19.10.4.4)

Among Surrealist techniques exploiting the mystique of accident was a kind of collective collage of words or images called the cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse). Based on an old parlor game, it was played by several people, each of whom would write a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold the paper to conceal part of it, and pass it on to the next player for his contribution.

The technique got its name from results obtained in initial playing, "Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau" (The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine). Other examples are: "The dormitory of friable little girls puts the odious box right" and "The Senegal oyster will eat the tricolor bread." These poetic fragments were felt to reveal what Nicolas Calas characterized as the  "unconscious reality in the personality of the group" resulting from a process of what Ernst called "mental contagion."

At the same time, they represented the transposition of Lautréamont's classic verbal collage to a collective level, in effect fulfilling his injunction-- frequently cited in Surrealist texts--that "poetry must be made by all and not by one." It was natural that such oracular truths should be similarly sought through images, and the game was immediately adapted to drawing, producing a series of hybrids the first reproductions of which are to be found in No. 9-10 of La Révolution surrealiste (October, 1927) without identification of their creators. The game was adapted to the possibilities of drawing, and even collage, by assigning a section of a body to each player, though the Surrealist principle of metaphoric displacement led to images that only vaguely resembled the human form. One, by three hands, begins with a spider, which gives way to a man's torso the feet of which are formed by two jugs. Other, more interesting cadavres exquis were reproduced in a special issue of Variétés titled "Le Suréalisme en 1929" (fig. 288). One of these begins with a woman's head by Tanguy, which dissolves in to a jungle scene by Max Morise, returning to a female anatomy schematically indicated by Miró, and terminating in "legs" in the form of a fishtail and an engineer's triangle by Man Ray."

this whole idea of a collective art and the negation of intellectual property can be found today in the notion of sampling and DJing in music (to add and subtract as seen fit) and the free software movement (open source and copyleft).  the meta-idea that the ideas and memes are more important than profit and credit.  to evolve the work as it grows, to release the ego and to admit that art is not created in a vacuum, but within a feedback  loop involved by every participant. - @Om* 7/29/00

• tribal electronic entity Exquisite Corpse.  member: Robert Heynen of Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia
• release _Dream Night Dance Music_ 12" on Kk #083 (1992)
  • a1 _Etoiles
  • a2 _Sitting In A Tree (Time Flies)_
  • a3 _BKS_
  • b1 _Sacrifice_
  • b2 _Strange Attractor_ MP3 (vK)
  • b3 _Elevator_
• release _Reassembling Reality_ CDs on Kk (1992)

• _What A Life_
• _Anxiety_
• _Traditional Ties With Dreaming_
• _Honeymoon_ MP3
• release _Inner Light_ CDs on Kk (1993)
• _Point Zero_
• _Shadow Play_
• _Cantadora_
• _Passage_
• _Calling The Quarters_
• _Inner Rhythm_
• _Between Worlds_
• _Tepu_
• _One_
• track _Exquisite Corpse_ MP3 by Bauhaus off of _The Sky's Gone Out_

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