Exquisite Corpse: Manifesto

"If we were living in Paris..."

This is just a little bit of background and theory. If we were living in Paris, you could call it the "Manifesto" section, but we're not. And besides, there's no shrieking call to rip up the cobblestones and vivons le revolution. You may find it interesting, but feel free to skip it. It won't affect your understanding of the rest of this document.

"Exquisite Corpse" was the name of a technique used by the Surrealists in the early part of the 20th Century to explore the idea of accidental creation. They would pass around a paper, write phrases on it, then hide part of the phrase. The next person would add their own contribution, and so on. The Surrealists used this technique for drawings as well as poetry and stories. The name itself comes from one of the first results: "Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau. (The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine)."

(See www.exquisitecorpse.com for more information)

Creators like Art Spiegleman (known, among other things, for the comic anthology RAW, the graphic novels MAUS, and his New Yorker covers) have used this technique to create collaborative comics, combining both story and art. Spiegleman called this effort Narrative Corpse, which combined the efforts of 69 cartoonists who drew 3 panels each of a story involving a generic stick figure.

(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0963812947/)

In some genre fiction, like science fiction, writers have tossed chapters back and forth to each other, as challenges to each other's creativity. Characters would move ahead in unexpected ways, to surprising conclusions.

This is a pretty common thing in other forms of art, such as music and performance. Improvisation in those mediums is more immediate, though also more ephemeral unless recorded. Jazz or rock musicians improvising solos or whole melodies, starting with only a chord progression or less. Trained improv actors use techniques like The Harold (http://www.improvolympic.com/del/harold.html) to create whole plays from only the briefest of outlines.

In our case, we wanted to create a format that would allow for relatively traditional linear storytelling (like comics or animation), the benefits of hypertext (where a footnote in one document can lead someone to a whole new universe), and the interactivity of role-playing games and online communities.

So the overall story would follow a pre-determined plot, but the community of participants would, like an audience shouting out words at an improv performance or writing a letter to the editor, be able to determine some of the specific pathways taken to get to that end point. And the creators of the story could feed information to the audience through a variety of formats, including posts made as characters from the story.

Essentially, the Flash chapters serve as the starting point for debate and participation by the audience, leading to an evolution of the storyline to reflect the audiences desires (up to the point where it would conflict with the main storyline).

This isn't an Exquisite Corpse in the fullest sense, with each creator having fully equal control of where the story is going to go. It is perhaps closer to a role playing game like Dungeons and Dragons or Everquest. It has this in common with the original goal of the Surrealists, though: it has experimentation in mind, the desire to try to create a story, to create art, using new tools and techniques.

And maybe your help!