this piece on grief and friendship was with and for shannon steneck and ning li.
read the piece here.
the rules for 7×7 are below.
The game is a variation on the Surrealist game of exquisite corpse, designed to guide a writer and artist into an improvised collaboration.
Once the participants are “paired,” the participants determine a convenient date to begin.
The participants decide amongst themselves who starts the exchange: the artist creates a picture, or the writer begins a new composition.
The following day, the other collaborator responds according to his discipline, with words or an image.
In this fashion, the two participants alternate turns, interpreting and elaborating on what has come previously in the spirit of “Yes, and…” No narrative swerving is off-limits; it is likely and encouraged that the collaborative process move the collaboration into territories neither participant would have conceived on his own. The participants need not follow traditional storytelling conventions as long as the collaboration moves “forward.”
Contributions should not take more than 2 hours to complete. The visual artist is limited to one image per turn. A writing contribution should not be longer than a single double-spaced page or 300 words.
The game is ended upon completion of 7 image-text pairings.