Ryan Whitby: Exquisite Corpse

Abstract

P1: I begin with a system.
A1: I interpret the system as something else.
A2: I reflect it back with too much symmetry.
A3: I rearrange it until it breaks.
A4: I watch the fragments fall into pattern.

Exquisite Corpse stages a series of surrealist parlor games between one designer and four AIs. Each game begins with a generative, rule-based system—tiles, scripts, procedural forms—then is passed from one machine to the next, each trained not to follow instructions but to interpret.

This is a conversation between scaffold and skin. One approach builds from the bottom up, assembling complexity through constraint. The other works in reverse: scanning for resemblance, projecting intention, and filling in gaps based on precedent.

The results don’t resolve—they drift. Shapes become suggestions. Networks become faces. These exercises generate meaning not through clarity but through collision: between code and coincidence, between logic and its misreading. What emerges is a new kind of architectural fiction—almost real, almost remembered.

Biography