This FEELed Note was written by FEELed Lab Administrator Julia Jung. Deir new publication “Sensing the Ocean through the Exquisite Corpse ArtScience method” is out now, you can read the full paper here.
When I tell people that my PhD project explores the potential of polyamorous thinking to support relationship development in transdisciplinary collaborations within ocean science and marine conservation, they are often surprised. When they ask about my project origin story, I talk about my lived experience as a polyamorous person and tell them about the Exquisite Corpse project.
The Exquisite Corpse project is a research project that I started more than 4 years ago when I was working as an independent researcher as a collaboration between the Cobra Collective and Ocean Networks Canada. A few years ago, a group of friends introduced me to the Exquisite Corpse game developed by Roz Ray in 2010. The game is an asynchronous collaborative art-creation process based on a surrealist exercise from the 1920s. Every participant creates a series of connected artworks based on a shared inspirational prompt and artworks are exchanged between participants.
After a few other ocean artscience collaborations with Ocean Networks Canada, I suggested we could explore the potential of this Exquisite Corpse approach to surface participants values and divergent understanding of extreme ocean events. We also thought that this method might help to bring our budding community of practice around ocean artscience closer together. In the end, our final publication is almost all about relationships and specifically the way this process mediates relationship building.
Academic time travel
Academic writing and publishing sometimes feel like time travel. I used to feel quite anxious imagining my future self reading things that I’m writing now and disagreeing with them. But I also like the idea that anything we create is just a little time-capsule – like an article capturing what it was that I thought about, felt and wanted to draw attention to then even if I might see things differently now.
Since starting this project, I have moved 3 times internationally and cross-continentally hoping to find an academic (and general) home for conducting my PhD. However, when I started this journey, I didn’t even know yet what my PhD project would be about. I knew I wanted to continue working with participatory equity-based processes around ocean science and marine conservation from an interdisciplinary perspective. It was partly writing this paper and the embodied experience of thinking deeply together about relationship development that allowed me to take my pull towards focusing on relationships seriously.
Sometimes tracing the flow of ideas, learning and inspiration feels muddy. I submitted the first manuscript for this paper before moving to Canada almost 1.5 years ago from my parents’ dinner table, the same spot I am sitting in now writing this reflection.
Around the same time as when we started the Exquisite Corpse project in September 2021, I took a train ride from Paris to Frankfurt with my friend, colleague and co-author Anna Zivian. During the train ride, we talked about the upcoming Exquisite Corpse project. The same conversation was the first time that I mentioned this shimmering idea in the back of my head about linking polyamorous thinking and transdisciplinary collaborations.
Even though it would take 5 more years until I am – now – officially working on this idea, my PhD project and this Exquisite Corpse project were always intertwined. (And I continue to be deeply grateful to Anna for her enthusiasm, feedback and encouragement in that first conversation and ever since! <3)
The FEELers Climate Justice Exquisite Corpse Project
The Exquisite Corpse project has also inspired a range of ‘spin-off’s’ that keep spinning and emerging. Feeling encouraged through our project, Theresa Schwenke and I started the “ICYMARE Art project” for the International Conference of Young Marine Researchers that we both helped organize for a few years. We used the method as a pre-conference networking activity and set up an evolving exhibition during the conference.
For our 2025 FEELers Summer Camp, I organized a similar activity based on my ICYMARE experiences. We organized a pre-summer camp craft project based on the question “How do you connect that place to this place?”. We had an evolving exhibition during summer camp and eventually in our post-camp dreaming and reflecting sessions, this grew into our current FEELed lab Climate Justice Exquisite Corpse project.
The FEELed lab 