“Exquisit Dork”

A game by Donald Fodness

 Exquisit Dork:

When I was in grad school I invented a game called “Exquisite Dork”. This game was a spin off of the surrealist game “Exquisite Corpse”. Exquisite Corpse was about blindly creating a composite figure that manifested the collective consciousness of the participants; Exquisite Corpse was very social. While Exquisite Dork includes responding to images from pop culture as integral to its nature, it is a hermetic and masturbatory game layered in a complex process to ensure participants respond blindly to the pop culture imagery initially foraged. I have come to a realization lately that my mug stacks are related to “Exquisite Corpse” and “Exquisite Dork”. I see them as referencing the figures/bodies of antiquity while using chance and play to reference pop culture.  They are also time capsules and urns as they literally contain, or entomb, the kitschy byproducts of our era. If we are fortunate enough to have people of the future to reflect on this era I want them to know the gods that we worshipped. Exquisite Dork should reveal our individual relationship to these gods, or a larger god, as well. 

How to play Exquisite Dork:

1 Forage for existing images from popular culture. This can be anything of interest to you. 

2. Make sure you have an abundance of images to work with; so many that you might forget about some. 

3. Cut these images out and organize them with the back facing up. 

4. Cut them in half so you have a flat edge to respond to. 

If you cut this in half from the back side you are responding more blindly to the image when you do end up responding to it. 

5. Without looking at the front of the image, label each image on the backside with a code system that is random and does not have any association with the image.  

6. Give each coded cutout its own fresh sheet of paper and write the correlating code on that piece of paper. 

7. On that piece of paper place the cut image face up in the center of the page and draw a line along the flat side and little tick marks that extend certain lines from the image onto the blank sheet. 

8. Once all of the cutouts have a corresponding sheet of paper with little tick marks, and a proper labeled code, separate all of the sheets of paper from the cut images to further create distance from making conscious responses to the cut images. 

9. Now make a stream of consciousness drawing that responds to the lines that once extended off the cut image.  Because you are not looking at the original image and hopefully forgot or are unaware of which specific image you are responding to, there is some blind or subconscious connection. Either way this process should minimize an overly clever response and ensure more apparent randomness or chance. 

10.Once the stack of sheets of paper now have drawings on them, find the correlating image by using their matching codes, and place (and glue if preferred) the cut image next to the drawn edge to create a combination that reveals your relation to the collective consciousness.