Exquisite Corpse as Generative Art

The seemingly simple “game” is in fact a radical mode of creativity: it decentralizes & distributes authorship, introducing chance & surprise as key elements — analog generative art.

Decentralized Art

The creative technique known as Exquisite Corpse — or Exquisite Cadaver — refers to a method by which words or images are collectively assembled by a group of collaborators. Each participant, unaware of what’s been drawn prior, adds to a composition in sequence until the work is complete.

No one person knows the whole until the end — at which point the artists are no longer artists but have become viewers along with everybody else. It’s a kind of generative art as it introduces chance as a driver of the creative process, decentering the artist as master. As the creative process is distributed among multiple “artists,” no one is the artist, no one the master, in a game of Exquisite Corpse.

At mmERCH, we’ve never stopped playing.

A Brief History: From Surrealism to Children’s Games

André Breton, a French writer and principal founder of the Surrealist movement, reported that this playful and enriching game was developed around 1925 at a friend’s residence on the outskirts of Paris. Similar to an old parlor game known as Consequences in which players take turns writing on a piece of paper, concealing their text and passing the sheet along to the next player for further contribution, Exquisite Corpse evolved from this concept and was adapted to include drawing and collage. This creative pastime became a favorite amongst artists such as Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró and Man Ray, often partaking in this group activity during surrealist gatherings at French cafés throughout the 1920s and 30s.

While the Exquisite Corpse technique famously evolved into “mix and match” games played by children — often seen in books in which pages are cut into thirds or fourths, allowing for the playful mixing of images and objects — elements of this creative methodology permeated the art world throughout the 20th century. We see similar uses of this method in Andy Warhol’s Female Movie Star Composite drawings from the 1960s, as well as through the work of Jean-Paul Goude, a photographer whose post-modern images of exaggerated scale and proportion seek influence from the Exquisite Corpse methodology.

Chance as Collaborative Fashion Designer

Exquisite Corpse may rely on chance but it’s not about creating any image whatsoever. As Francis Bacon said about his own creative process, the goal is to use chance. “I want a very ordered image,” Bacon said, “but I want it to come about by chance.” It’s about introducing chance into the process in order to take us — both artist and viewer — astray of ourselves and our inherited thinking.

It’s not about being random. It’s about creating hedges, guardrails, and rulesets that collaborate with chance in order to create compositions no single person could ever have imagined — but that are still compositions. Exquisite Corpse, after all, is bound by the materials used, usually paper and ink, as well as by simple rules that help ensure the resultant drawings are more or less coherent.

The trick in applying generative design to fashion, then, is to create parameters that keep the output something wearable — as Bacon might say, a very ordered item that came about by chance. These parameters can shift based on how outlandish you want to be. Perhaps you begin with a silhouette and, maybe, a fabric. You can then predetermine traits — pockets, hoods, bands — to ensure there aren’t, say, 28 pockets on a hood or no bands whatsoever. This fine tuning of parameters and rules is constitutive of the creative process.

As with Exquisite Corpse, algorithmically generated fashion is decentralized. There’s no one person, no star designer, at the center. The new “fashion designer” — which could be any single person but could also be some assemblage of people — curates inputs such as patterns and fabrics. Someone writes the code which distributes inputs according to a ruleset that includes an assignation of rarity, among other things. You hit “enter” and, voilà, out comes a stream of singular designs co-created with chance.

There are countless implications for everything from ideation and design to manufacturing and retail to the wearer’s relationship with their attire. But, for now, we’ll just say we love the play of generative design and are excited to see where it takes fashion in the future.

mmERCH is Neo-Couture. We code, cut, and curate luxury apparel where every piece is 1-of-1-of-x, linking art and fashion across the digital, physical, and virtual. The Juice Box is where we discuss the history, future, and philosophy of Neo-Couture. Visit mmERCH >