Round Robin

I aimed for simplicity and creativity. I turned a girl into an orange-eating vampire, and gave an orange arms and legs. I derived both of these characters from something: Laura from Le Fanu's Carmilla (which I am reading for my 114 class) and Julius from the drink "Orange Julius'. I thought it would be fun to watch these characters interact with each other, as their interests contrast, and was excited to see whether Julius would survive.

I hadn’t realized, at the time, that it would be hard to maintain the specificity that Laura was an orange-eating vampire, and Julius was, indeed, an orange with arms and legs. Only the person immediately after me in the process knew those facts to specifically. The story developed into something less linear than I’d hoped, but was enlightening in that I learned that collaboration without communication is nothing more (or less) than a medium less controllable than watercolor. 

So, here is my story.

Laura The Vampire

Laura is a vampire. Except, she doesn’t drink blood; she drinks orange juice. Julius is an orange. (Maddy)

One night, the whole town ran out of orange juice. Laura thought that she could borrow some from Julius. She didn’t sleep that day. (Juan)




Laura couldn't get vitamin C from the sun. She didn't want to "borrow" from Julius. But, she must survive. (Heather)



Julius was quite the cautious type, but not too smart. His vitamin c was behind some lasers, but the wire was not. (Jake)

---- (Amy)

Artist's Statement

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.