The Exquisite Book

Imagine sipping espresso at some fabulous French cafe with Andre Breton, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp. Breton is sketching something on a sheet of paper and then divides the paper into thirds. He hands it to you and challenges you to draw the middle section, extending only a hint of the drawing over the seam, and then hand it off to Duchamp to fill in the bottom. This actually sounds like one of my anxiety dreams but this game, Exquisite Corpse — or cadavre exquis, if you’re not ready to leave the Parisian cafe, was devised by Andre Breton to play with his surrealist friends.

The concept of this game has since taken on many variations, including collaborative writing games and designer mash-ups like Photoshop Tennis. A few RISD graduates had begun a casual drawing game in an art history class, sharing napkins or a piece of notebook paper to co-create visual narratives together. After forming a design firm agency together, an idea germinated from partner Julia Rothman’s blog, Book By Its Cover to take the Exquisite Corpse concept and extend it into a book project.

For The Exquisite Book, the team selected one hundred artists, divided into groups of ten to take on a chapter. The artist with the first chapter drawing was given a specific theme to follow and then the artist passed their piece off to the next artist to interpret the idea. The only instruction was for the initial artist to define a horizon line to be carried over into the following pieces.

The outcome is fascinating. The pages of each chapter fold out so the effect of seeing the individual pieces as a collective visual narrative is not lost. The pages referenced above are from the chapter, The Village, where a literal village moves into a forest with red-eyed wolves who turn into red tongue pugs who turn into red eyed pugs engulfed in a hellish inferno (poor pugs).

Related posts:

Many people think a little motivation means success will fall into your lap. But that isn’t how it works. You see, motivation isn’t the answer. It isn’t the endpoint. It is where you start. Finding…

JavaScript is a programming language that was first developed in the mid-1990s. It was created by Netscape, a company that was a pioneer in the development of web browsers. JavaScript was designed to…

I can create any page be it homepage for a new website, inner page, designing a landing page, or redesigning an existing webpage. For a beautiful, professional, responsive website, please order one…