Our Tools of the Trade

We will utilize video as our primary tool in this endeavor, but we will apply it in a very unusual way. In the 1920's, influenced by Freud and Jung, a group of artists and intellectuals called the Surrealists explored ways of collaborating to produce art and poetry. They developed methods, sometimes taken from children's games that they believed would allow them to contact one another more directly, bypassing personal and cultural boundaries.

During this project, we will adapt the most famous of these Surrealist games, called "The Exquisite Corpse," to our purposes of cross-cultural exchange. The basic principle of this game is that one person begins to create a poem or drawing, which is then passed on to a second person (and sometimes to many more people!) until it is completed. Often, the latter people in the chain are not shown all that was created before them, so they are only reacting to an aspect of what came before. In any case, the structure involves a series of responses to prior artistic gestures, for as long as the process continues.

For this project, we will first work through the written word, and later through video, to develop dialogues between a group of students at Purchase College and a similarly aged group of students at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, Mexico and Bilgi University in Istanbul, Turkey. We will utilize email and the Internet to write stories and develop video scripts, which will in some cases later be produced. We will also create videos collaboratively, without prior scripts, where students in each country will create short scenes, send them across the Internet to their partner, who will respond by shooting and editing a scene of their own. This process will continue to echo for an extended period of time, gradually creating a cross-cultural audio/visual weaving.