Week 1: Final project modelling, or, fleshing out the exquisite corpse

Intro to Exquisite Corpse

My idea for my final project is based on the Surrealist drawing game Exquisite Corpse. The linked MoMA article defines it best: “A game in which each participant takes turns writing or drawing on a sheet of paper, folding it to conceal his or her contribution, and then passing it to the next player for a further contribution.”

I love this game, because everyone can add something new, and the resulting composition is always surprising and whimsical. I’ve played it with my friends at picnics, at concerts, on the bus, and more. There is no skill floor nor ceiling for this game, and everyone plays for the love of the game. Isn’t that beautiful?

Here’s an example of the game which is in the collection of the Tate Modern museum:

And here’s an example of the game which was done by a father and his two 5- and 7- year old sons:

My idea

My vision for my project is an infinitely extensible Exquisite Corpse kinetic sculpture with modular body parts and tiles. Ideally, I’d love to incorporate some electronics so it can move on its own, constructing and deconstructing new permutations of the Corpse. I am picturing its movement as similar to that of a slot machine, rotating and locking into place and rotating and locking again. I want the visual composition to destroy and reconstitute itself again, kind of like this animation I made from a drawing I did in my sketchbook:

Sketches

My initial idea was to have some kind of belt, so that the whole thing could be mounted on a wall. This was selfish in motivation: I just moved here, and my walls are painfully bare. I wanted a mechanism where the tiles which served as the options for a given body part (e.g. the different possible “faces”) could rotate on a belt. I talked to Alfonso and he told me the idea was too complicated, so I simplified the idea down to a sculpture which rotates about a central axis.

Modularity is a really important feature of this design to me. I want to be able to add arbitrarily many body parts (e.g., a very loooong torso comprised of many units) and I want to be able to easily generate new tiles (that is, possible completions for a given body part). I want to make the mechanisms as robust to resizing as I can, so I can make a small prototype for my desk and also a large one which is taller than I am.

The journey begins… stay tuned!