Interactive Flash artwork · commissioned for Net:Reality · 2005
Exquisite Copse — Net:Reality screenshot1 / 4
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, the work toured 20-21 Visual Arts Centre, Scunthorpe (23 July–29 October 2005); Q Arts, Derby (12 November–18 December 2005); Space4 at Peterborough Museum & Art Gallery (19 January–3 March 2006); The Brindley, Runcorn (15 April–13 May 2006); and Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery (9 June–9 July 2006).
Net:Reality featured new work by Simon Biggs, Glorious Ninth, Neil Jenkins, Jessica Loseby, Michael Takeo Magruder, Stanza and Michael Szpakowski.
It was subsequently shown in Without Boundaries at Pine Street Creative Arts Centre, Sydney (20–30 November 2008), and the Art Gallery of New South Wales Research Library (1–10 December 2008). The original Flash work is preserved through web archives and may require emulation to run.
Exquisite Copse was also presented at Third Iteration, the international conference on generative systems in the electronic arts at Monash University in November 2005, and selected for the 2006 Drunken Boat Panliterary Awards.
The original live web environment required Flash 7 or later. Web hosting was provided by Ivan Pope.
Contemporary response
Read Lewis LaCook’s review+
You know about trees, right? Not just the organic kind, the ones outside your window, but the ones in our heads, the ones we've been using to filter data since before the advent of the Machine and the Network (at least before these things took circuitry form)? Neil Jenkins, a British artist enthralled by networks and the stubborn strands one can weave through them, has fashioned a knot of words crawling over words and called it his Exquisite Copse.
Punned from the old Surrealist parlor game (take a piece of paper; draw or write on it; fold it over so that the person next to you can't see what you wrote/drew; pass it along a line, and watch a picture/poem evolve from the gathering), Exquisite Copse invites visitors to either view trees that have already been started by past visitors, or plant a new tree of their own-so at the work's initialization, there is already a forking off. One limb is deceptively passive-there's no agency in watching an already-seeded tree unfold, not on the surface. These trees smell like History, though; and, like History, their bark might appear still to the touch, but that touch is always both participatory and preparatory. The history of a work always engenders its own agency.
One of the things I've always loved about Neil's pieces are his interfaces. Look at the Visitor's Studio he designed for furtherfield.org - he's done a quirky take on chat-room interfaces there, allowing us to project our presence onscreen via mouse-motion. A lesser artist would have used a text box; Neil, however, has thought about what it means to communicate over a network, what it feels like to step off into an aether in which geography falls away. He gives us another locative marker - the position of our mouse - in which we can seek orientation.
With Exquisite Copse, Neil's interface is once again beautiful. Users can control the visual growth of their trees with mouse clicks - as if, instead of pay-per-click, it were rain-per-click, water-per-click. A selection of novels forms the database upon which Exquisite Copse works - there's Kafka's Metamorphosis, Melville's Moby Dick, Carroll's Alice in Wonderland; Douglas Adams' universal geek classic, The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is there; even a Samuel Beckett novel. Users "seed" these texts with words of their own. The Copse takes what it finds near the word - the rhythm of the text becomes paramount. I could hear these poems recited, a human voice riding the sinewy waves of their cadence. This is unfortunately unusual with algorithmic art. Too often, one doesn't feel the human in the work; too often it's numb. There's much of humanity and much of living in this work.