A warrior, grieving his son's death, obsessed with taking his vengeance on the gods, became convinced by grief and sunstroke that he was a god himself.
"Blinded by fury and the fact that his glasses had been stepped on in battle,
the warrior was unable to see his son was alive and well."
In his blindness and panic, the father became disoriented. Mistaking him for an enemy, he put his spear into his son.
As his father stabbed him with the spear, Andromedes remembered the myth: sons killed by their fathers become demi-gods.
Aidan: The first thing that comes to my mind about this assignment is its organizational difficulty. It would be simple enough if it were done all at once and in person. However, for our group at least, the virtual element became problematic. Whether from technical difficulty, or the kind of miscommunications that occur in virtual conversation, we experienced confusion. In my case, this was creatively restricting because I spent more time stressing over communicative errors than thinking about artistry or collaboration. As far as the work that was done, I found it to be challenging because there is no sense of control. However, it does prompt one to be more economical in the use of language. I found that to be a valuable experience in making less words mean more.
Tabitha: We’ve repeated frequently that creativity loves constraint, and in these short story exercises, I’ve found that to be the case. There’s something really challenging and yet freeing about having to communicate plot, character, theme, and ambience in 20 words, ten words, six words – whatever the case has been. It’s intriguing to build off other's ideas in both written and visual form, but in this particular assignment, the communication and technicalities tripped our group up a bit. In Totems without Taboos:The Exquisite Corpse, DJ Spooky speaks of breaking down “the linear flow of ideas between people.” The at-times confusing form of this assignment made it a bit hard to do that, and it sometimes seemed as if we were creating an unwieldy, passive Frankenstein, a painfully self-aware and pointless monster, instead of the one that haunts Mary Shelley’s novel purposefully. It’s an elegant art form, however, the very short story, and feels like a language of its own. To learn it feels essential, but the path to doing so can be hard to navigate.
Trevor: These story sequences were exercises in entropy both in the interpretation of them and organization to do them. Writing and compiling the stories became a weird mission of preservation. There was an odd weight of lineage and legacy to respecting the last story and passing on something understandable and inspirational for the next while trying to write something decent. It’s an odd way to play the surrealist game DJ Spooky told us about, turning the Exquisite Corpse into a preservationist exercise. A truer playing would have veered into the irreverence of something like Axe Cop’s childish, self-contradictory bliss nightmare.
Camden: This telephone-esque exercise was a fine example of how the style of a story can develop a momentum even if the various chapters of the tale are written blindly by different authors. As readers, we can easily discern the familiar components of our favorite genres. As writers in a group, we perceived distinctive story components and were able to incorporate those components into whatever chapter we contributed. It's almost compulsive. We don't want to write something that goes against the established theme or tone. As a testament to this, some aspect of the original tone was preserved within each mini-series written by our group.
Barrett: Throughout the entire assignment, I was most fascinated by the way my story seemed to evolve. It made me realize that whether or not we intend to apply the “Exquisite Corpse” idea to our art and our stories, historically, it is bound to happen anyway. Do not all stories and ideas become embellished and drawn out over time? The organization of this assignment was inevitably a disaster. Not in the ideal sense, perhaps, but in the realistic carrying out of it. I’m still not sure if it was all done correctly at this point. But I tend to believe that is part of the process and certainly part of the art. Confusion is only compounded into the spontaneity of our responses. In fact, disastrous collaboration is often what spawns cherished art. The somewhat humorous example of the ruined Ecce Homo fresco in Spain comes to mind. It developed from ancient art to bizarre reconstruction attempt to template for memes. This assignment allowed us to just taste that process and be aware of doing so.
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