Today, the 105 Collective is pleased to announce the birth of 0xquisite Corpse: four 1/1 collectively created artworks in a collection built on Transient Labs’ Dynamic Art Engine and tokenized on a single ERC-721TL contract.
You might know the parlour game of “Consequences” – in which a player writes a phrase on a sheet of paper, folds it over and passes it on to the next player, who adds another part, and so on until a collaborative text is created. This game inspired a group of Surrealists – including Yves Tanguy, Jacques Prévert, Marcel Duchamp and André Breton – to invent a similar drawing game: the first player draws the top of an object, folds it over and passes it to the next player, who adds another part, and so on, until a collaborative composition is created. This game came to be known as Cadavre Exquis, translated as “Exquisite Corpse”, originating from a Consequences sentence that particularly appealed to the Surrealists: “Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau” (“The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine”).
Inspired by the Surrealists, the 105 Collective’s 0XQUISITE CORPSE is our take on this artmaking process, with a few technological twists. It all started at our first face-to-face meeting, which took place at the Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibition at the Tate Modern in July 2021, where we were all wowed by Ted Joans’ incredible 36-foot long Exquisite Corpse drawing, Long Distance. This mail art extravaganza took nearly 30 years to complete and united contributions from over 130 artists from all over the world. As a group preoccupied by collaborative creation, transnational identity, dreams, symbolism and the connection between the random and the inevitable, it’s perhaps not surprising that we felt we had to give it a go, too!
We created a template and system whereby each artist created a “head,” covering the top portion of the drawing before passing it to the next artist to continue the piece, according to a carefully worked out system. To make it more complicated (we like complications!), we decided the Corpses should be dynamic, so that they would cycle through four different iterations in correspondence with specific times of day – Dawn (5am to 9am), Day (9am to 5pm), Dusk (5pm to 9pm) and Night (9pm to 5am). The changes are synced to the viewer’s local timezone and can be experienced in real time via Transient Labs.
While this piece is strongly rooted in analogue practices as with our previous pieces – MORE THAN GLASS and THE IMAGINARIUM (part of Async’s Forever Supper) – 0XQUISITE CORPSE is digitally native: it could neither have been conceived nor appreciated without digital capabilities as part of its aesthetic intent.
The title 0XQUISITE CORPSE plays on “0x”, a prefix used in hexadecimal numbers and commonly seen in Ethereum addresses and smart contracts. According to André Breton, Surrealism is a means of uniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience into “an absolute reality, a surreality.” 0XQUISITE CORPSE reflects that union of dreams and the mundane, the union of Surrealist concepts with the opportunities of dynamic digital art and blockchain, and – most importantly – the union of the random and the inevitable that we would be foolish to write off as mere coincidence.
We’re now happy to announce that the Corpses are minted, and will be open for auction within the next two weeks or so. In the meantime, we invite you to the project’s landing page, where you can see the artworks cycle through all their iterations, hop to the Corpses’ metaverse installation in OnCyber, and listen to accompanying music written for the artwork by oculardelusion.
