ONLINE EXQUISITE CORPSE WRITING PROJECT: THE SYSTEM
Okay everybody. I have been working out how this might work and I believe I have a workable procedure that will be effective for those ranging from the highly skilled web practitioner to the casual user. So, everyone who is reading this is welcome to participate and to invite others. Note: If you have no idea what I am talking about here, go back and read the initial post on this topic.
Note: I expect at least a few people from the old stomping grounds at Drake to participate. Hamilton folks, the same goes for you. And hey, if you have visited this blog more than three times you ought to feel obliged to give this a whirl.
Note: The Exquisite Corpse to the left was done by Andre Breton and friends. If you don’t know who Andre Breton is, or why he is important to this project, you should look him up. He is worth looking into.
Thus, the rules will be as follows:
1] Send an email with your preferred email address to: contact@fourinchesofego.com along with a message indicating your desire to participate. You must do so by Friday, April 21.
2] I will generate a random sequence. I will then notify the first person in the sequence to write/produce their segment. I am not imposing a strict definition of what writing is, so feel free to stretch some conventional definitions or not as you see fit. I do ask that you write your segment relatively promptly – no more than 24 hours.
3] That person will then email to me the final three words of whatever he/she wrote – or a similarly small final fragment of their segment. [For example: if you were to use a sequence of images, only send the last one, or even just a part of the last one; you will need to determine what is an appropriately small fragment. You can always ask me if you are uncertain.]
4] I will then forward that word/fragment to the next person on the list, which will be the starting point for the next person’s segment. This process will repeat until everyone has written/created a segment.
5] At this point I will notify everyone that it is time to post. Once you post your segment you will need to email to me the URL of your segment – if you are using your blog please email me the specific URL of that post, not just your blog address.
6] Once I receive all the URLs I will email each person with the URL of the post segment that follows theirs. [i.e. if you are the third person in the sequence, I will send you the URL of the post from the forth person in the sequence, and so on.] You will then add a link to that URL at the end of your segment; thus the Online Exquisite Corpse Project will come together. This will also allow people to access the entirety of the Online Exquisite Corpse Project beginning at any segment within it. Whoever composes the final segment will link to the first.
So that is how I envision it running. I am open to suggestions and tweaks from those participating about how to smooth this out. I am also willing to assist those who want to participate but have questions.
For all of you out there who do not have a blog, I can make suggestions about creating an accessible location to which you can post your segment. The first thing I would suggest would be to create a MySpace account – or one at a similar site. That would give you an easy-to-edit place to post. Other places you could try would impose more contextual pressure – such as a dating site profile: just join and use your profile/description. You could look around on the web for any place you can join for free and create a user profile. These almost always offer you an editable profile that will provide a URL.
If you have something you want to try but are unsure about finding a place to post, just drop me an email and I will try to help. What really matters is that you have a stable URL to which the previous contributor can link. I might even have some emergency options in my bag.
Therefore, it is time for you, dear readers, to join me in this experiment. Drop me that email. Recruit your friends and colleagues.
5 Comments:
Poking-Stick Man is confused and alarmed by the procedures described herein. Poking-Stick Man will, however, make every effor to comply.
ycshwute
Something else perhaps worth considering: when done, aren't exquisite corpses supposed to be seen in their entirety (as in the Breton example you posted, 4"oE)? I'm just wondering if there's some way of getting around all this linking -- something which does ultimately leave the constituent elements separate.
What if person D -- the last one in the chain -- were to send his/her chunk back to person C, who would then attach it to his/her online chunk and then send the new larger chunk of corpse thus created onto person B... and so on and so forth. Nobody would be in possession of the entire corpse at any given time UNTIL it arrived back at person A, who would post it on his/her blog; and surely we all have enough self-control NOT to look at the fragment we've been sent until the entire corpse has been assembled. Come to think of it, none of the individual chunks would need to be publicly posted; only person A would be responsible for posting the completed corpse on his/her website or blog. And since the identity of person A would shift with every iteration of the exquisite corpse, no one person would have to be overlord of this endeavor.
Does this make sense? What I'm proposing, in other words, is that the procedures by which the corpse comes into existence -- the forwarding of words from person A to B to C to D -- simply be reversed in order to assemble the independently composed fragments -- the forwarding of chunks of text from person D to C to B to A.
If I've overlooked anything here, please feel free to point it out. However, if you do point anything out, be warned that I may go back to referring to myself entirely in the third person.
uosal
The problem with posted the Exquisite Corpse in its entirety in one place is that some essential components of online reading is missed -- the ability to meander and/or get lost, changing context of where what you are reading is. Where something gets posted may add as much as what is posted. Exactly what counts as part of the segment? What if i follow a few links from the same page as teh actual segment before returning to the corpse, are those activities part of the Corpse?
There are a lot of issues of online reading/activity that I don't want to lose here, that go beyond writing and/or drawing as it occurs on paper -- the traditional exquisite corpse process.
But -- as I said -- I am happy to help people with details. And if people are overwhelmingly concerned I may go with something like this -- but I'd rather not collect it one URL.
Poking-Stick Man concedes the validity of these points and hence returns to referring to himself exclusively in the third person. Poking-Stick Man humbly suggests, however, that the endeavor perhaps be called the "Online Exquisite Dismembered Corpse Writing Project" in acknowledgement of the online incarnation's capacity to yield potentially productive forms of fragmentation and distraction. Alternatively, the name could just stay the same. Poking-Stick Man will gladly participate in the project and can be found in his usual haunts.
Oh, P-S M, I meant to tell you that you can use the comment section of my blog for posting your limbs and digits, when the time comes, if you want.
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