three

exquisite corpse: form and content

Parts of speech

Nouns (from latin nomen, “name”) 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” Adjectives

A word that modifies a noun Examples: “green”, “heavy”, “democratic”

Determiners (or “articles”) Those other funny words that come before nouns Examples: “a”, “the”, “some”, “which”

Verbs Words that express actions, changes, or states of being Examples: “go”, “went”, “is”, “love”, “has loved”

Exquisite corpse

“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)

A technique used by the early surrealists for creating unexpected combinations

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

Fancy word for “grammar” Describes how a language is composed of phrases

NounPhrase = determiner adjective noun the exquisite corpse a pickled monsoon

VerbPhrase = verb NounPhrase eats a pickled monsoon

Sentence = NounPhrase VerbPhrase the exquisite corpse eats a pickled monsoon

Can have different alternatives for a type of phrase 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

Some verbs are followed by entire sentences VerbPhrase = verb | verb NounPhrase

| verb Sentence [Sentence [NounPhrase We]

[VerbPhrase proclaim [Sentence [NounPhrase the exquisite corpse] [VerbPhrase [verb will drink] [NounPhrase the new wine]]]]]

This is called “nesting” or “recursion”

What have we learned?

Media have Structure/form/syntax Meaning/content/semantics The two are interdependent, but semi-autonomous

Media are generativeTheir grammars can be filled in in an infinite number of ways

People are incredibly good at extracting meaning, even from “meaningless” media

Chance operations can produce interesting juxtapositions Specify a structure Fill in positions randomly (There are other ways of doing chance operations too…)

Syntax of meta

We’ll be using a programming language called meta It has a very simple syntax (we’ll modify this later):

Expression = word | number | “[“ Expressions … “]”

Phrases are explicitly grouped using brackets Examples

[box 10 10] [point 100 100] [line [point 100 100] [point 20 20]]

We’ll talk about semantics next …