Workshop with PEOPLE LIKE US (Vicki Bennett): Exquisite Corpse

Using preexisting selected found physical/conceptual material, participants will engage in a game of Exquisite Corpse to generate ideas for new work.

The game 'Exquisite Corpse' (also known as 'Consequences') is related to the creative process, whether that be the laying out of notes for a text, making a storyboard or the construction of a film narrative. It is an index of possibilities and daydreams that in fact need no end outcome, it is all about the journey. When played as a 'game' it's an entertaining way of finding out about one's own memory, making visible the hidden patchwork quilt of an individual's knowledge banks – hinting at how we make connections within ourselves and to each other all the time. We are able to visualize the scope for making tangents within the overall journey where every direction is permitted, and sometimes discover the limitations of our own hard circuitry (our memories).

With internet search engines, forums and databases we are not limited to just our own recollection of a song or a text or a movie scene, we can search other people’s memory banks too through keyword searches – the whole of the internet is a massive thesaurus of unrealized new connections and potential creations.

Find here the background material of the workshop:
Teaching pack about process.
Radio work about ideas and how we use them.
Documentary film about People Like Us/Vicki Bennett.

Under the name “People Like Us”, artist Vicki Bennett has been making work available via CD, DVD and vinyl releases, radio broadcasts, concert appearances, gallery exhibits and online streaming and distribution for 25 years. Since her first publication in 1992, Bennett has developed an immediately recognisable aesthetic repurposing pre-existing footage to craft audio and video collages with an equally dark and witty take on popular culture. She sees sampling and appropriation as folk art sourced from the palette of contemporary media and technology, with all of the sharing and cross-referencing incumbent to a populist form. Embedded in her work is the premise that all is interconnected and that claiming ownership of an “original” or isolated concept is both preposterous and redundant.