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
"daspada"or "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 teaching morals - the relative
level of reincarnation, and multiple perspectives
represented whether life's lessons had been
learned - or not. The British took it to England
in 1890s and from there, it spread to the rest of
Europe and the world, but the basic idea is that
the idea of living multiple lives, games theory,
and the moral relationship between individuals
and society was linked to rules - it seemed like
a good place to reflect on how games get
"sampled" and remixed, depending on which culture
they're in. Cut and paste the result, and the
basic idea is that this is all about information,
and how we play with it. It could easily be Pac
Man, Quake, or Halo2 it depends on your frame of
reference. It's a thread that easily connect
artists as diverse as Luis Bu?uel, John Cage,
Virgil Thomson, and Grand Master Flash. Yes,
Grand Master Flash! The whole idea is to look at
links - at connections that are unacknowledged
but also undeniable: chance processes, and
randomness do that - they scramble subjectivity
in a way that lets the unconscious methods we've
used to sort information in our minds become a
filter for the way we engage the external world.
It's a scenario that turns the mind inside out,
and that, like pop culture always says, is a
"good thing."

Humanity, according to most studies of
"information theory" creates about 8 to 10
exabytes of information a year in the 21st
century. An exabyte (derived from the SI prefix
exa-) is a unit of information or computer
storage equal to approximately one quintillion
bytes. Its such a large number that it's
literally beyond human comprehension. For
example, the total amount of printed material in
the world is estimated to be around five
exabytes. It was estimated that by the end of
1999, the sum of human knowledge (including
audio, video and text) was 12 exabytes - UC
Berkeley School of Information suggests that 5
exabytes of storage space was created in 2002
alone, 92% of it on magnetic media, mostly on
hard disks - the vast majority of this space is
used to store redundant intellectual works such
as music and commercial video.

A while ago, University of California Berkelely
claimed that 5 exabytes of data approximately
equals "all words ever spoken by human beings"
this statement is just the tip of the iceberg,
but you get the idea - there's a tremendous
amount of information being produced by our
culture, and the real way that humanity
experiences most of it is through multi-media.
That's where the "exquiste corpse" concept comes
home to roost.

Think of one exabyte as a zillion gigabytes, and
you get the idea - scale, density, and the sheer
volume - it's all getting smaller, more
fragmented, and more nuanced. That's more
information than most of humanity has made
throughout its existence on this planet over
millions of years. Exquisite Corpse is a game -
it's also known as "exquisite cadaver" or
"rotating corpse" - but basically, it's a
filtering process where a collection of words or
images are assembled collectively, and the result
is commonly known as the exquisite corpse or
cadavre exquis in French. Each collaborator adds
to the collage composition in sequence. It's the
sequence of the game that makes the tension
between each player a connected, and ultimately
enriching experience - each person is only
allowed to see the end of what the previous
person contributed.

Think of a more technology oriented description
this way: adaptation to human-engineered
technologies, testing formal and ecological
theorems for high-density lifestyles, sustainable
resource sharing among urban organisms, and the
play of public/private division in cross-species
interaction. Got it?

Info density isn't about the information just
sitting happily on your hard-drive, on your
canvass, or in the artists studio: the whole
theme of this group of essays is a reflection on
the different paths information takes as it moves
from one culture to the next, one individual at a
time. Think of Moore's Law: Expressed as "a
doubling every 18 months", Moore's law suggests
the phenomenal progress of technology in recent
years. Expressed on a shorter timescale, however,
Moore's law equates to an average performance
improvement in the industry as a whole of over 1%
a week. What game does that open us up to in the
era of large numbers? For example - at
pandora.com visitors are invited to enter the
name of their favorite artist or song and to get
in return a stream of music with similar "DNA,"
its essentially, in effect a private Internet
radio station microtailored to each user's
tastes. There's more - for example, customizable
Internet radio services like Pandora, Last.fm,
Yahoo's Launchcast and RealNetworks' Rhapsody are
pointing users to music far beyond the playlists
that confine most FM radio broadcasts. The most
familiar form uses so-called collaborative
filtering, software that makes recommendations
based on the buying patterns of like-minded
consumers. Think of the "customers who bought
items like this also bought ..." function on
Amazon.com. Your tastes, and the way the travel
through the system are based on variables that
leave trail for the algorithms running the
software to model - that is then passed on to
someone else, and so on and so on. Think of it as
the cultural update of what "daspada" was about,
just transcribed to the realm of the digital -
the Surrealists anticipated this, and made it
enjoyable.

In the realm of video and online media, the craze
of "Machinima" - or when kids remix video game
characters to make their own films, or in the
realm of dj culture - it's the mix tape - but the
common denominator is selection. The whole
schemata that I'm pointing out is that density,
and the tools we use to navigate it, are
barometers of the deep structure of culture as it
is translated into information - it's a pattern
that, as the 21st century advances, will become
more and more linked to the way we live and the
way we play.

Moore's original statement can be found in his
publication "Cramming more components onto
integrated circuits", Electronics Magazine 19
April 1965 - but for the intents of this essay,
let's think of the basic frame work as a mirror
for Mie Van Der Rohe's infamous quip about
design: less is more. Whisper that in someone's
ear and see what happens.

The remix, as always, is what you make of it.
Juxtapose, fragment, flip the script - anything
else, simply put, would be boring. This
anthology, like the original game of the
Surrealists, points to a place in culture where,
the process of art is a collaborative process.
It's a situation that requires, like the name, a
kind of collective action. The drawn version
predates the written version - the anthology is a
map of an un-drawn terrain of bodies and minds.
Think of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - the
mis-matched body parts, the fragmented speech,
the neo-Romantic sense of loss and renewal - what
would that creature feel if it knew that it was
justa figment of Shelley's imagination, a
conversation piece made up on a cold night in
Switzerland in the 19th century? Flip the script,
cut and paste the result, and the literary
equivalent of the artificial creature flows off
the page and becomes another story, another
composition, another way of seeing a world
rapidly advancing into a frame of reference that
we know is at the edge of what we call human.

Again the main motif of the scenario - the drawn
version predates the written version - it's a
kind of guessing match that produces what has now
become a mass culture clich?: that's what I'm
talking about. Collective memory, and the way it
unfolds in the expression of culture, I guess
that could be referred to as the "exquisite
corpse" too. The whole idea of this anthology is
to explore the places on the cultural map that
haven't been marked, places that on any other map
would be marked "here be dragons" - yes, the
blank places. They invite interpretation, and
yes, the active mind wants to doodle and fill in
the emptiness. The map's blank spaces beckon like
some kind of light at the end of a dark tunnel. I
can only say that this collection of writings is
a lexicon, a guide for interpreting a phenomenon
that we all know waits at the edge of our
imagination, if we only had the tools to navigate
its unknown space.

Some have played the (graphic) game with a more
or less vague or general prior agreement about
what the resulting picture will be, but this
defeats the essentially Surrealist nature of the
game - you can say "look, these are the spaces
that we present to you, and the rest is a method
acting course in roles that no one is quite sure
about how to play - the rest is up to you." See
if the puzzle pieces fit, draw a line connecting
the dots. But most of all - have fun!

Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid
NYC 2006