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The Poly-Phone will consist of multiple structural elements built as oversize telephone receivers approximately 13 X 2 m in size, each equipped with a loudspeaker for talking and a microphone for listening, thus enabling more than one person to call simultaneously . It will also be possible for the callers talking through the different giant receivers to hear and respond to one another; dialogues will be possible between individuals who do not know each other and who may live at opposite ends of the globe. At the same time, the listening public on location will itself be able to take part in the live conversations, talking directly into the microphone sections of each element. In this way the Poly-Phone sculpture, situated in a public city square, will create an open forum for spontaneous oral communication. HIDDEN BEARERS: AN EXQUISITE CORPSE ONLINE Gil MinaMora, 1492 Pacific Ave. #16, San Francisco, CA 94109, U.S.A. Received 10 May 1990. The telecommunications network lends itself well to Lautreamont's contention that "poetry must be made by all, not one". One of the ways that this can be done is with an exquisite corpse accessed through an electronic bulletin board system (BBS). In the traditional version of this collaborative writing game, a piece of paper is passed from player to player, with each person adding a single line to the existing text. The paper is folded after each contribution so that each successive player can see only the last line, to which he or she will then add. In the electronic version, the CRT (cathode ray tube) is the paper and a program does the folding . This exquisite corpse suggests one successful strategy for creating art on an electronic network. An exquisite corpse program resides in the Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN), a conference on the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link). The program was initiated on 5 May 1988 and the first corpse was 234 Abstracts completed on 26July 1988. To date, eight have been completed and the ninth is in the works. The program runs under the UNIX environment and is written in UNIX shell scripts. It is set up so that when someone enters the program from ACEN's Datanet section, they are presented with a brief explanation of the exquisite corpse and how to contribute to it. They are then shown the last line from the latest contribution from which to continue. They can add whatever they like in ASCII (the American Standard Code for Information Interchange) and then exit the program. The program keeps track of the number of entries; after the 69th, the completed work is stored and a new exquisite corpse begins with the line "The exquisite corpse shall drink the young wine". With the exquisite corpse online, the game is open to anyone with access to the computer network, rather than to a limited group of artists devoting some time to the poetic investigation of chance pairings and the marvelous in the everyday. It is possible at any time for a broad range of people from distant points to contribute . In this way anyone can take part and add to the disencumbering of the creative act from the partitions and etiquettes of specialization as well. In a simple form, the exquisite corpse also points to one way of working a BBS, a medium that is accessible , interactive and always changing. The part of the work that the artist creates can make use of and function as cryptophores [1]. Each artist's contribution becomes an armature around which the total work is wound or fleshed out by those participating in the completion of the art. In the case of the corpse this armature is the hidden poem and the single last line from which to draw. The structure of an armature could be much more complex, however. Two of the basic issues that come up while thinking about experimenting with and implementing cryptophoric art are how to structure dynamic armatures and how to syncretize the additions completing the art. Making use of things such as sacred geometry, hidden themes and underlying structures in popular culture, chance, computer modeling and simulation, games and forecasting systems (I Ching...

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