Woman with Words (Round Robin)

With the world moving further into the digital age, some have become resistant to the changes saying that the “millennials” are losing their contact with others and their creativity.  Though like DJ Spooky says, with this media comes connection, comes communication with others.  He mentions how we can collaborate with others to be even more creative and allow our ideas be spread more widely and added upon.  I think about Pinterest in this sense, where people come together, present their ideas that then get shaped and modeled by others. This results in even more creativity being shared.  This assignment is supposed to achieve this, sort of a community within the group that creates five different stories with five different viewpoints making up stories.  It reminds me of “Everyone is Art” by Samira Harris, which is a collaborative artwork involving pictures of several people to make up a resemblance of Botticelli’s painting “The Birth of Venus”.  Our group of several people make up individual parts of these stories separately, but as a whole they come together to create art.

Part 1 (Heather Moser)- I was thinking about how  when we hear things, coming back from a class, the words sometimes spill out of us and we basically lose that information.  I thought this would be a great beginning of a story that could go somewhere, hopefully in a way that the words would instead come out of her mouth once she plugged her ears.  I wanted it to be a sort of panic that these words were spilling out of her because that is sort of how I feel when I can’t retain some of the information from classes.

Part 2 (Jake Nelson) - The spilling forth of words made me think that the story was going to deal with the theme of candid expression and our struggle with retaining some of our harmful communication. As a result, I wanted to show that the words could not be contained by such an easy solution, thus the fact that the words only found another exit. I hoped by continuing the playful, yet groutesic theme that the story would reflect a fairytale of sorts where the protagonist comes to and realizes that harmful communication is stopped from within, rather than simple fixes outside.

Part 3 (Amy Peterson)- She looked 'round her room in a panic, grabbing a bucket to catch the words pouring from her mouth. 

Part 4 (Maddy Purves)- Her breathing slowed as she watched the letters in the bucket form words, and gasped when she read what they said.

I’d read that the character “looked around desperately” for a bucket for the words to spill out of her mouth and -- feeling as under the weather as I, myself, was -- took that statement literally. I wanted a bird’s eye view of the bucket into which the character had vomited her thoughts, feelings, etc. in the form of letters. I then thought it would be interesting to see what words these letters would combine into, and decided upon words like “forgiveness”, “happy”, and “love”, for the last person in the chain to interpret.

Part 5 (Juan Rodriguez)-She forgave herself and moved on with her life.

Coming up with a conclusion wasn’t easy. Without knowing her name and what happened before, I only knew that I needed to come up with a conclusion. It could either end well or bad. The last part was about forgiveness. By the way it was written, it felt as if the protagonist came to realize something very important. Whatever it was, this was my starting point for this last part. She finally forgave herself and now everything is going to be alright.

As eloquently stated by DJ Spooky in his preface to the Exquisite Corpse, recent advancement in social connectivity is fueling the fires of collaboration; breathing life and form into the masses of information we consume everyday. Despite the increased flow of information, however; collaboration and the art that derives from it continues to be dictated by the unbreakable, universal rules of chance and individual perception. Each one of our blogs displays a spin off of the Exquisite Corpse and evidence of the mentioned universal rules. As a team, we played a game where one individual begins a story, only to be constrained to writing under 20 words and sending the rest to be filtered through the artistic channel of four others. After coming together and analyzing each individual’s justification for their respective part, we were able to not only discover the following insights into how a disjointed story can work together, but also basic patterns manifested in collaboration itself.
After coming together, we each explained our justifications for the parts that we’d played. As a team, we realized that the game had forced us to think about our stories through a lens of communication -- which communication, in and of itself, fits under the definition of a ‘medium’. As a group, we each had to adapt to what the people before or after us in the process chain would add or take away from what we, ourselves, had imagined. Some players were able to adapt quicker than others, while the others were able to adapt more cohesively. This did not become apparent, though, until the game had finished, because there was such a lack of communication. 
Therefore, without communication, the stories became more about expressing our personalities and worldviews rather than plotline. The game was challenging. It was hard to release some of our precious creative control into the hands of chaos, but chaos was crucial in preserving the crucial element of purity with regards to our reactions and responses. Most importantly, out of this purity came a story that was more creative and unique than we could ever imagine.
Looking deeper, we as a team felt that our game also helped unlock additional insights into the role of collaboration in art itself. As mentioned by DJ Spooky and class discussion, collaboration as an artform may seem disjointed and Frankensteinian in many regards. Each individual carries their own worldview, which is only accentuated in narrative construction as that worldview seeks to adapt to constraints and filters. Above all, however; these constraints are what make the Exquisite Corpse the artform that it is and the strongest glue that binds our story together. Each part of the story is unique in content, yet similar in which is what made. It stands as a microcosm of art itself, where we merely sample and elaborate off the shoulders of artistic giants who came before. Information and creativity may exponentially increase in a globalizing world, but the rules of artistic creation remain the same; forever dictated by the constraints our game portrayed.