1. exquisite corpse: form and content
three
exquisite corpse: form and content

2. Parts of speech Nouns (from latin nomen, “name”) Adjectives
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”

3. 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” 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”

4. Exquisite corpse drawings
Source:

5. 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

6. 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]]]

7. 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”

8. What have we learned? Media have
Structure/form/syntax
Meaning/content/semantics
The two are interdependent, but semi-autonomous
Media are generative Their 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…)

9. 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 ]
[line [point ] [point 20 20]]
We’ll talk about semantics next …