Computational

Exquisite Copse

Preparing the book data…

Select a book, enter a seed word, and press enter. The local runtime returns possible following words from the selected book.

A play on the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse, Exquisite Copse visually rewrites existing works of literature into a forest of word trees, based on seed words entered by visitors. Each branch grows with words that might follow in the original text.

The collected trees form a copse, a Surrealist landscape and journey through myriad narratives, created and influenced by both visitor and author.

Commissioned for Net:Reality

A UK touring exhibition of installed net art with new work by Simon Biggs, Glorious Ninth, Neil Jenkins, Jessica Loseby, Michael Takeo Magruder, Stanza and Michael Szpakowski.

20–21 Visual Arts Centre, Scunthorpe
23 July – 29 October 2005
Q Arts, Derby
12 November – 18 December 2005
Space4, Peterborough Museum & Art Gallery
19 January – 3 March 2006
The Brindley, Runcorn
15 April – 13 May 2006
Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery
9 June – 9 July 2006

Later presentations

Without Boundaries, an exhibition of artists’ books: Pine Street Creative Arts Centre, Chippendale, Sydney (20–30 November 2008), and Art Gallery of New South Wales Research Library, Sydney (1–10 December 2008).

The work was also exhibited at third iteration, the international conference on generative systems in the electronic arts, Monash University, Melbourne (November 2005), and was included in the 2006 Drunken Boat Panliterary Awards.

Reconstruction and provenance

This browser edition restores the original 2005 work for modern browsers. Preserved source files remain unchanged; the publication movies are clearly identified local derivatives made to restore the reader, presentation and interaction.

Technical setup and credits

Ruffle
Open-source Flash Player emulator. The self-hosted web build packaged with this edition is 0.2.0-nightly.2026.4.12.
Flasm
Flash ActionScript bytecode assembler and disassembler used offline to inspect and assemble the local SWF derivatives.
Local data bridge
Browser Fetch, Cache and Service Worker APIs preload the seven book dictionaries and answer the original reader calls without a live CGI server.
Archival data tools
Perl, DB_File and Node.js are used only to prepare and verify the static publication files; they are not required in the browser.