This is an essay I've written as the foreward to
an anthology on the classic gameThe Exquisite
Corpse: Collaboration, Creativity, and the
World's Most Popular Parlor Game edited by Kanta
Kochhar-Lindgren, Davis Schneiderman, and Tom
Denlinger, to be published by University of
Nebraska Press (2007). This collection is the
first set of original essays to provide a broad
retrospective on the legacy of the Corpse
project-and we are defining this legacy fairly
loosely, with representation from historical,
literary, collaborative, moments (etc.). The vibe
is open and the text, I guess, is too.
enjoy!
Paul aka Dj Spooky
Totems without Taboos: The Exquisite Corpse
By Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid
Database aesthetics, collaborative filtering,
musical riddles, and beat sequence philosophy
aren't exactly things that come to mind when you
think of the concept of the exquiste corpse.
But if there's one thing at I want to you to
think about when you read this anthology, its
that collage based art - whether its sound, film,
multimedia, or computer code, has become the
basic frame of reference for most of the info
generation. We live in a world of relentlessly
expanding networks - cellular, wireless, fiber
optic routed, you name it - but the basic fact is
that the world is becoming more interconnected
than ever before, and it's going to get deeper,
weirder, and a lot more interesting than it
currently is as I write this essay in NYC at the
beginning of the 21st century. Think of the
situation as being like this:
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? The basic response, for me, is
that they didn't - there was no one way of seeing
anything, and if there's something the 20th
century taught us, is that we have to give up the
idea of mono-focused media, and enjoy the
mesmerizing flow of fragments we call the
multi-media realm. 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 blasting
your opponents. Move to the next level. Repeat.
It could easily be a Western version of a game
that another culture used to teach about morals
and the fact 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 - the
idea that we learn from experience and evolve
different behavioral models to respond to
changing environments is a place where complexity
meets empathy, a place 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. What makes Exquisite
Corpse cool is simple: it was an artists parlour
game to expose people to a dynamic process - one
that made the creative act a symbolic exchange
between players.
Some economists call this style of engagement
the gift economy - I like to think of the idea
of creating out of fragments as the basic way we
can think and create in an era of platitudes,
banality, and info overload. Even musicians and
artists - traditionally, the ciphers that
translate experience into something visible for
the rest of us to experience - have for the most
part been happy for their work to be appropriated
by the same contemporary models for material
power that have created problems for their
audiences - power and art happily legitimizing
each other in a merry dance of death, a jig where
some people know the rules of the dance, but most
don't. But this death, this dematerialization
- echoes what Marx and Engles wrote about way
back in the 19th century with their infamous
phrase all that is solid melts into air. Think
of the exquisite corpse concept as a kind of
transference process on a global scale. When you
look at the sheer volume of information moving
through most of the info networks of the
industrialized world, you're presented with a
tactile relationship with something that can only
be sensed as an exponential effect - an order of
effect that the human frame of reference is
simply not able to process on its own. At the end
of the day, the exquisite corpse is just as
much about renewal as it is about memory. It
depends on how you play the game.
The way I see it, is this: whenever humanity
tries to really grapple with the deep issues -
life, death, taxes, you name it - it becomes a
game, and I like to think that like most human
endeavors, exquisite corpse is all about
chance processes. For example, the Indian game of
daspadaor Snakes and Ladders as its commonly
called, has its origin in documents from India
around 2nd century BC. It's said that it was used
as a game for
