The famous “Exquisite corpse” (from the original French term cadavre exquis, literally exquisite cadaver) is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g., “The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun.” as in “The green duck sweetly sang the dreadful dirge.”) or by being allowed to see only the end of what the previous person contributed.
This technique was invented by surrealists and is similar to an old parlour game called consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Surrealism principal founder André Breton reported that it started in fun, but became playful and eventually enriching.
The name is derived from a phrase that resulted when Surrealists first played the game, “Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau.” (“The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.”) André Breton writes that the game developed at the residence of friends at an old house in Montparnasse, 54 rue du Château (no longer existing). Besides himself he mentions Marcel Duhamel, Jacques Prévert, Yves Tanguy and Benjamin Péret as original participants.
The real interest that the Exquisite Corpses arouse lies in the fact that these bizarre, assembled images somehow speak to us. After all, the famous aphorism of the Count of Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), a French poet from the 1800s who inspired the Surrealists, goes like this:
“Beauty is the chance meeting, on an operating table, between a sewing machine and an umbrella”
With 8th grade students, after exploring the artistic movement of Surrealism and its main artists, , we tried to play this game: 6 people sit around a table, take a sheet of paper and the first person secretly writes a NOUN (animal, object, person…), folds the page so that the others don’t read it, and passes it to the next person. The next person adds an ADJECTIVE, folds the sheet of paper, passes it to another person who writes another NAME and another ADJECTIVE, subsequently the last two participants add a VERB and a PLACE:
- NOUN (animal, object, person…)
- ADJECTIVE
- NOUN (animal, object, person…)
- ADJECTIVE
- plural VERB
- PLACE
Finally, the paper is unrolled and the result is read. For example:
“a happy goat and a purple hammer are dancing on a roof”
Each participant of the game will eventually have their own sheet with two objects, people or animals described, doing something in a specific place. After composing our sentences we entrusted them to an Artificial Intelligence Image Generator, like Canva, Musavir , Fotor, AI Test Kitchen.
Here are our “Exquisite corpse” with the surrealist phrases that generated them through Artificial Intelligence, in this game the fun is guaranteed!
