Round Robin Artists' Statement

In his essay entitled “Totems without Taboos: The Exquisite Corpse,” DJ Spooky asserts that “the remix, as always, is what you make of it. Juxtapose, fragment, flip the script — anything else, simply put, would be boring.” During our Round Robin exercise, it seemed as if everybody was “flipping the script” as each group member continued the previous person’s story, this led to some drastic tonal shifts within the narratives. On the flip side of that, there are some stories where a thread is woven finely throughout all five of the mini-stories, making a (more or less) complete narrative, with each story complementing the last.

  This technique of starting a story and then passing it on to another to complete is nothing new; there is a game called “Photoshop Tennis” during which one person introduces a photograph and then sends it off to another person to add a visual element to it, who then passes it on to another person to edit. This goes on indefinitely, unless a specified  number of edits has been pre-agreed upon. An example of this is:

  “The “text” is never inanimate — it’s the human imagination that gives shape and meaning, the elixir that breathes life into the golem.” In some ways, pieces of art that we create and “finish” are never really done. Unbeknownst to us, somebody could pick up that piece of work that we created and add to it until it is unrecognizable from the work that we created initially.

  Another art form that can be remixed is music. Famous artists create and release music that then gets into the hands of the remixers, who then make the music their own by adding and removing musical elements. By doing so, they restructure the song in a way that was never meant by its original author.

  In our Round Robin storytelling experience, each of the tiny stories stand alone. However, combining five of the stories together creates a collage of different ideas that all spring from the same seed. Each contributor used a different vocabulary to try to make sense of the unusual and limited information they were given. In a way, one artist’s choice to use “the hardiest of folk” to describe a group of people that a previous artist described as “notoriously rowdy bunch” differed in verbal texture as much as water colors and oil paints do. Thus, even if all of us tried to preserve the tone and content of the story, it would inevitably change over time.

  Our individual pictures added an extra element of expression and another opportunity to leave our mark on the story. We had varying styles and a wide variety of framing to suggest plot. As mentioned earlier “The remix, as always, is what you make of it. Juxtapose, fragment, flip the script”. On occasion, an author would create a juxtaposition, fragmentation, or script-flip between the picture and the text, thus creating an odd precedence in the mind of the next author. Close-ups versus wide shots, color versus monochrome, and other such aesthetic decisions all added something different to the mix.