Digital Creatives: Exquisite Corpse

Design International

Levels 4-8
NGV Digital Creatives supports the integration of STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) with the visual arts and provides an authentic context for developing problem solving, critical and creative thinking skills. Coding activities are inspired by works in the NGV Collection and exhibitions.

The activity uses Scratch – a program which teaches the foundations of coding. Students apply mathematical and computational thinking to get creative with coding.

Learning Objectives

experiment with key programming concepts including timing, levels and costumes.
use code to build a ‘make a creature’ game inspired by the surrealist game ‘exquisite corpse’ and add own graphics and drawings to the game.
use a Makey Makey kit to create a circuit and external game controller.

Supported by Telstra 

Themes and Ideas

The Surrealists and ‘Exquisite Corpse’

The Surrealists were a group of artists who were interested in exploring memories, dreams and unconscious thoughts. They liked to experiment with ways to get new ideas, including by playing creative games. In one of their drawing games they mixed up objects and parts of bodies to make strange new creatures. They called this game ‘exquisite corpse’.

Workshop Instructions

In this workshop, we’ll be creating our own version of the ‘exquisite corpse game’ which we will call ‘Make a Creature’. We will be using Scratch, a simple coding language that lets us build programs using blocks of code. We will add our own drawings, to create interesting and unique creatures. Later, we’ll get even more creative and make our own controller for the game.

Access the activity: (Incomplete version of the game)
Access the completed version of the game

Make a Creature: Part 1

Make a Creature: Part 2

Make a Creature: Part 3

Resources

A transcript containing all the instructions from this activity is available to download.

Access the video transcript
Access the written instructions: (Write the Code)