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The World’s Longest (and Weirdest) Artwork

It may not be the world’s longest piece of art yet, but one day it will be. So far, it’s 67 metres long, and growing…

In 2009, two surrealist collage artists (my dear friend Xtian Noregisteredsurname and myself, Mat Blackwell) decided to get together and make a digital collage in the great Exquisite Corpse tradition (a technique developed by the original Surrealists in 1925, but which has its origins even earlier). With the original Surrealist Exquisite Corpse technique, one artist would make a piece of art, then fold it down so only the very end of the artwork was visible, and the next artist would begin their piece of art with that original small sliver as a starting point – and so on, until the artwork was finished, making a collaborative piece of art, the finished state of which none of the collaborators had any real say in.

Xtian and I decided to do the same thing, with digital collage – except our idea has one very large difference. It has no end. Whereas the old games of Exquisite Corpse were limited by the size of a piece of paper, our Exquisite Corpse is a digital collage: we’re working in a digital medium, so there’s no trouble with storage or exhibiting the work – it’s stored on the interwebz, and exhibited on your screen – and so it can be any length. No limits!

The plan is, we will keep on working on this, in turns (with only each others’ little slivers to work from), for the rest of our lives. When one of us dies (I’m guessing it’ll be me, because Xtian has plans to LIVE FOREVER), only then will the piece be finished.

As of this post, it is 67 metres long – that’s longer than two blue whales, and more than half the height of the Eiffel Tower. And this is the thing – it’s only been going for 7 years!

Neither of us knows how long it will end up being…

Click on the “More info” link to see the whole thing. The whole piece (so far) is available to view there as it was intended to be seen, one long mind-bending continuum, but here are some selected sections for now. Madness ensues!

NOTE: some sections are NSFW, some sections are creepy, some sections are wildly colourful, some sections are satirical, some sections are filled with pop-culture detournment, some sections are blasphemous, some sections are… well, all the good stuff, really!

More info: infinity.gadzooxtian.com