Exquisite Corpse Shuffler

Description

This exquisite corpse shuffler randomly shuffles to choose which head, torso, and feet to pair together to create an exquisite corpse. It does so by using a uniformly random selection for each body part, then loading the chosen image. Each body part had a user-defined function “chooseHead”, “chooseTorso”, and “chooseFeet” that randomly selects then loads the body part when called. One of the parameters of these functions is the image width, which can be adjusted when calling an argument with this function. Another user-defined function in this sketch is the frame rate, which determines how quickly the sketch reshuffles and loads a new exquisite corpse combination. The parameter for this function is the frame rate, which can be increased or decreased to speed up or slow down the exquisite corpse shuffler. The collage man is by Junru X. with photo credits going to SDFZJ, a WeChat meme artist, logo credit to The New School, and arms and legs found in Google images. The other figure is by Jackie Xia, and I drew the wolf dog.

Click here for the link to the p5 editor and sketch.

Design Process

My partners for this assignment are Junru Angelina Xu and Jackie Xia. Above is a compilation of my figure (left), Junru’s figure (middle), and Jackie’s figure. I really loved the contrast in the styles of each of these drawings, so to emphasize this contrast I gave Junru and Jackie’s figures brightly colored backgrounds so all three images would really stand out from one another, especially when being combined in the exquisite corpse shuffler. All three of these figures also represented vastly different characters. My figure is of a young wolf who one day hears music coming from a human's house. Entranced by the music, she discovers her love for dancing. However, this is frowned upon by the other wolves in her pack. The young wolf still longs to dance, so she decides to leave her pack and go to the human's home and pretend to be a dog in order to convince the humans to take her in. She dances for the humans, and unlike the other wolves in her pack the humans are delighted by her love for music and decide to take her in. Junru’s collage doesn’t have a story per say, but is rather a visually driven combination of fragments of images, running with the idea of a figure that is pieced together. Jackie’s figure is based on her habit of people watching and represents the New Yorkers going about their lives as they navigate through these strange times.

I noticed that all of our stories speak to the human experience, which fits in nicely with the story of my figure who wants to live amongst people. By mixing our backstories, the story of this shuffled exquisite corpse is still of a young wolf who leaves her pack in order to live with a family of humans, but this time she is fascinated by human culture long before she hears music. Whenever she sees people, she studies their facial expressions, their strange attire, and their anatomy. She is fascinated by clothing and what humans choose to wear as well as what parts of their bodies they choose to cover. When she leaves her pack, she chooses to go to New York City as she believes this is the best place to people watch. She observes how individuality is celebrated amongst New Yorkers and realizes the best way to be taken in by a human family is to simply be herself. Lastly, she goes to the human’s house where she heard music and starts to dance for them, doing what she loves most. The humans are taken with her and choose to adopt her from then on.

Reflection

I really liked how my sketch turned out, and it was actually a bit surprising for me how such contrasting figures made up a wonderful exquisite corpse. I thought the most interesting part of any exquisite corpse is seeing the results of various combinations, which is why I decided to shuffle the body parts in my p5 sketch. I also found our final story interesting, considering how different our figures were, their stories all stuck to the central theme of documenting and celebrating the human experience. Perhaps it’s only natural for artists and designers to lean towards that.

Through writing this code, I also solidified my understanding of the difference between arguments, parameters and variables and can better appreciate how they work together. I ended up with a much cleaner code by defining my own functions as well, which seemed much more intimidating before I gave it a try. Ultimately, it helped create a code with more modularity and variability, and it became much more interesting than some of the more stagnant codes I have written in the past.