BSL's 'Exquisite Corpses': Way More Fun Than it Sounds

On January 25th, BSL inaugurated its new social committee at nearby Alpha Soul cafe in Ottawa's Hintonburg neighborhood. The committee kick-started its term with a spirited brainstorming session on everything from possible group outings to party plans for the upcoming retirement of a colleague.

A surreal experience
Among the many state-of-the-art idea generation tools that the team employed that evening was the always-fun 'exquisite corpse' game (also called 'picture consequence'). Invented by early Surrealists, the exquisite corpse is a collaborative method by which an image or text is assembled from parts made without any knowledge of the whole.

In our case, the goal was to create characters by having one person draw the head, another draw the body and another draw the legs. Because the sheet of paper was folded after each portion was finished, later participants had no way of knowing what had been drawn before them - which led to some... ahem... interesting results.

More madness than method
Judging by our illustrations, it is hard to tell how this was supposed to tie into planning staff events or how it can even be of any use at all to BSL. Actually, we're probably still very far from using this mad method on any of our clients' projects - unless some of you request it (hint, hint).

On the other hand, it was definitely a lot of fun to sharpen our creative chops on a non-work-related assignment. The democratic and mostly anonymous process removed all sense of competition and helped loosen the rigid thought barriers that we sometimes impose on ourselves. If nothing else, making exquisite corpses was a great team-bonding exercise that all of us would want to do again.

My advice is to go ahead and try the game with friends and/or colleagues (template available below). All we're asking is that you make sure to share whatever Frankenstein-like creatures you put together.

We don't want to be the only ones with weird corpses in our digital closet...