simulacrum - a collaboration- Le cadavre exquis

A lot of our studio exercises involve collaborative group work. Sometimes, work from one table is passed to another and augmented, as with the previous session's mind-mapping exercises.

All of which put me in mind of the surrealist game, Le cadavre exquis [exquisite corpse], an exercise in creativity similar to consequences. I embarked on a similar exercise this summer whilst a member of a short story group, write club

Each week members were given titles and were tasked with the production of 1000 new words corrresponding to said title. I have posted quite a few of mine on this site (you'll have to go back to July, or have a look at the write club website). As the weeks progressed, some of the members began to experiment with other formats, with a friend of mine (who- until she decides to make her public entrance- shall remain anonymous) producing a collage, pictured below, for the title "simulacrum".

(hopefully my friend won't be annoyed about me putting it here because it is already published on the write club page)

I produced a fairly standard sub sci-fi romance which you can read here

She played with the idea of the copy of a copy (simulacrum, simulacra...) equisitely, so decided to spontaneously produce my own simulacrum...

I then scanned- lo res , grayscale [sic]- and returned to my collaborator to deconstruct and reassemble, only to be rescanned and sent back to me...

copy

of a copy

...

... a copy

*

Without permission from my anonymous collaborator I cannot yet publish the full extent of the project, but hopefully that will soon be forthcoming and I'll be able to share them here.