Agency and automatism : some strategies of irresponsibility in architecture

In the interstitial period in Paris between the fiery collapse of Dada and the official emergence of Breton's Surrealism several years later, the major proponents of the defunct Dada movement immersed themselves in a range of notorious experiments all aimed at aligning themselves with the sensation of psychic automatism and the ravaging spirit of the then fashionable Freudian unconscious. Generating a range of intellectual games, psychoanalytical procedures and drug-induced experimental states, this turbulent and highly creative period laid the theoretical framework for the radical culture of Surrealism and was instrumental in the creation of some of its most iconic early artworks and novels. Most famous amongst these was the game of the exquisite corpse where authorial control was challenged and even undermined by its blind and random dispersion amongst a number of disconnected bodies in both time and space. It was partially through these experiments that issues regarding agency and authorship in art were first problematised.