“This dreadful sounding activity began innocently enough as a Victorian parlour game, during which players sequentially added details to a collective story. At the time, it was known primarily as “Consequences,” but the Surrealists pushed the game to its gorey-sounding current iteration by adding in the element of blind collaboration. Many of you may have played some version of this game using a simple sheet of paper and a pencil. In the most common version, the paper is folded into thirds, and players add one segment of the body (corpse) at a time without seeing the preceding details. In the end, the paper is unfolded, and a Frankenstein’s monster of juxtaposed styles and species is revealed to the players. Perhaps the head is that of a giraffe, the torso of a capuchin monkey, and wheels where feet should rightly sit.

Our version posed a singular question to our Media Artists, “What is Media Arts?” Writers, animators, and filmmakers each created a small segment in their respective disciplines, and then turned the rest over to fate. Remarkably, as you watch our “Exquisite Corpse” unfold, you will find that the disparate parts reveal their own patterns and synchronicities. The differences break apart and our similarities become clear. We are writers and filmmakers and animators, but together, “We are Media Arts.””