Around 1925, in a flat at 54 rue du Château in Paris, a group of writers and painters invented a game by accident. André Breton, Yves Tanguy, Jacques Prévert, Marcel Duhamel and others sat around a table and passed a folded sheet of paper between them. Each person wrote a word (or, later, drew a part of a body), then folded the paper to hide it from the next player. When the sheet had circled the room the paper was unfolded and read aloud.
The game got its name from one of the first sentences it produced: le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau, "the exquisite corpse will drink the new wine." The phrase was so strange, so close to inevitability and so far from anything any one of them would have written alone, that they took it as proof of the method's power.
"Anyone who has lived inside an exquisite-corpse moment knows that the finest line is the one that comes from neither of the writers."
For the Surrealists, the point wasn't comedy. It was a way to bypass the self-editing that ruins most writing. With nothing visible to react to, each player wrote from somewhere closer to dream than to craft. The result (half-bird, half-typewriter; a line that argues with the line above it without knowing it; a kettle that remembers the sea) felt like a collective unconscious folded onto a single sheet.
The form has stayed almost unchanged for a hundred years. Children play it. The Beatles made variations on it. Filmmakers shoot it. The rule is always the same: only the last contribution is visible, the rest hidden, the whole revealed only when the game ends. Breton called it un jeu merveilleux des conséquences, a marvellous game of consequences.
moep.world is a digital reading of the same game. Two players, alternating lines, only the most recent line visible to the other. An AI paints what neither of them can see: a literal exquisite corpse, assembled by chance, revealed all at once at the end.
Adapted from Wikipedia's article on Exquisite Corpse, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.