Round Robin!

Once upon a time in the medieval woods,

There lived Big M, a wizard from the hood.

Big M, the wizard from the hood, got lost in the woods. He tried to use his magic to escape, but then he remembered he was actually a sea turtle. He missed the sea.

The sea turtle longed to return to the ocean and ride the pleasant currents. Suddenly he remembered that he was actually a computer programmed to think he was a sea turtle.

All of a sudden, someone looked through the sea turtle's porthole. It was a hermit, who claimed that he had the secret to eternal life if the turtle would let him inside. The turtle was suspicious, but decided to let him in anyway.

The hermit came in and began to read silently. 
"Well?" asked the turtle impatiently. 
"Slow down and stay steady. Going fast burns you out. Now be quiet," answered the hermit.

Joint Artists' Statement

Our Round Robin stories started out simple. However, as various writers added additional pieces, they turned into literary conglomerations in which the final pieces bore no resemblance to the original idea. For instance, one began as a girl who liked skittles having a psychedelic experience and turned into an old man addicted to doing other people’s homework. Some of the stories were logically connected to the pieces that came before, but as a whole, the conglomeration made no sense.

Such is the nature of exquisite corpse, a collaborative art form in which one artist draws a body part, and another adds to it in his or her own unique style. The creation is ultimately not cohesive. So was it with our Round Robin experiment. We learned that it is thus impractical to observe only one small piece of the work, or place responsibility on only one person for the whole.  Instead of wanting everything to work out according to the design of one single person, it’s much more interesting to supply our perspective in the collaboration and then appreciate how our perspective interacts with the multitude of others.  If we want everything to be exactly how we imagine, then we would be forced to work in solitude.

The nature of art is thus collaborative. As DJ Spooky puts it in his essay, “We all produce it, we all know it!” The best movies ever made pass the test of time because they were made by teams of enormously talented individuals who each contributed their strengths to the strength of the whole. As artists we can’t be afraid to let others add to or critique our art, because we are fallible human beings whose vision is limited by our own experience. Many minds and many talents erase this element of human weakness, and leave behind the element of human capacity and creativity.

An interesting insight we learned from this activity was the process and experience of having your story evolved/changed by others. It can be a frustrating experience when the story goes in a direction you didn't want or expect it to go, but this assignment helped foster an open attitude. We liked seeing the insight that others had and the different creative trails they would go down, especially with how they would take elements of the story and utilize them in their own vision.