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exquisite corpse: form and content
Parts of speech
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Nouns (from latin nomen, “name”)
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Adjectives
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A word that modifies a noun
Examples: “green”, “heavy”, “democratic”
Determiners (or “articles”)
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A word for a person, place, thing, or action, or a class of person, place,
thing, or action
Examples: “examples”, “noun”, “George”, “Evanston”, “running”,
“terrorist”
Distinguish between a general versus a specific use of a noun
Examples: “a”, “the”, “some”, “which”
Verbs
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Words that express actions, changes, or states of being
Examples: “go”, “went”, “is”, “love”, “has loved”
Exquisite corpse
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“Game of folded paper that consists in having a sentence or a
drawing composed by several persons, each ignorant of the
proceeding collaboration”
1939 Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism
(as copied off the wall at the Art Institute of Chicago)
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A technique used by the early surrealists for creating unexpected
combinations
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Produces sentences that are grammatically correct
But semantically challeng(ing/ed)
One of the first uses of chance operations in composition
“the exquisite/corpse/will drink/the new/wine”
Exquisite corpse drawings
Source: http://anexquisitecorpse.net/explanation.shtml
Syntax
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Fancy word for “grammar”
Describes how a language is composed of phrases
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NounPhrase = determiner adjective noun
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VerbPhrase = verb NounPhrase
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eats a pickled monsoon
Sentence = NounPhrase VerbPhrase
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the exquisite corpse
a pickled monsoon
the exquisite corpse eats a pickled monsoon
Can have different alternatives for a type of phrase
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NounPhrase = noun | determiner noun | adjective noun
| determiner adjective noun
The “|” character here means “or else”
an exquisite corpse bought the president
Phrase structure of a sentence
Linguists notate phrase structure by bracketing:
 [sentence [NounPhrase the exquisite corpse] [VerbPhrase
[verbwill drink] [NounPhrase the new wine]]]
Or more readably …
 [sentence [NounPhrase the exquisite corpse]
[VerbPhrase [verbwill drink]
[NounPhrase the new wine]]]
Nested grammar
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Some verbs are followed by entire sentences
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VerbPhrase = verb | verb NounPhrase
| verb Sentence
[Sentence [NounPhrase We]
[VerbPhrase proclaim
[Sentence [NounPhrase the exquisite corpse]
[VerbPhrase [verb will drink]
[NounPhrase the new wine]]]]]
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This is called “nesting” or “recursion”
What have we learned?
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Media have
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Structure/form/syntax
Meaning/content/semantics
The two are interdependent, but semi-autonomous
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Media are generative
Their grammars can be filled in in an infinite number of ways
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People are incredibly good at extracting meaning, even from
“meaningless” media
Chance operations can produce interesting juxtapositions
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Specify a structure
Fill in positions randomly
(There are other ways of doing chance operations too…)
Syntax of meta
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We’ll be using a programming language called meta
It has a very simple syntax (we’ll modify this later):
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Expression = word
| number
| “[“ Expressions … “]”
Phrases are explicitly grouped using brackets
Examples
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[box 10 10]
[point 100 100]
[line [point 100 100] [point 20 20]]
We’ll talk about semantics next …