The Missed Steak: The Exquisite Corpse

 A conversation via text message can either be incredibly compelling or absolutely boring, mainly depending on your individual role in the conversation. To tell a story through this medium, however, is something completely different all together. It was a fun (and actually somewhat challenging) assignment to concoct a story that could be told in such a way. In this case, we had nothing but dialogue as our method of delivery - not unlike the story “Kidnapped” we read on the “Hoot” app. This assignment was different, however, as the two of us had to play off of each other for creative inspiration.

In DJ Spooky’s text, “Totems without Taboos: The Exquisite Corpse,” we were introduced to the idea of creating a work of art and then letting someone else expound on it. He conveyed the idea that everything we may create is simply a remix of something done in the past. We are, in the end, products of our experiences and what we’ve seen. In a way you could say our little assignment here was another remix of “Kidnapped.” Regardless, we were able to work together and bounce ideas back and forth – essentially remixing the other’s ideas – to create a new story. This, believe it or not, can be hard to do. Many of us are hardwired to create on our own, but it is imperative to be able to build off of one another and work together. After going through our various exercises to come up with fun short story ideas, we figured we’d have a lot of fun staging a conversation between a girl and her dinner. It was as if the more wonky fairy tales of the Brother’s Grimm, or even something as modern as the film “Sausage Party” (in which talking food ignorantly desires nothing else but to be eaten by humans) acted as some sort of inspiration.

Our creative process for this assignment was a bit different than most others. Due to the fact that we had to rely on each other’s creative responses, the assignment to produce a story was mostly done in the moment. However, this could not have been done without some collaboration/inspiration time. After we decided on the characters and interaction we were going for, we discussed together the individual characteristics of our characters so we would know how to react and play that role. As a result, we were able to bring to life our characters.

An interesting aspect of our dialogue is the use of personification. The conversation we created is between a young girl and a piece of steak from the girl’s dinner. Through texting, emojis, bitmojis, and GIFs, we were able to portray the meat as any other average person of our day.