Surrealist Games Surrealist games Surrealists used many techniques, or games, to explore the role of chance and the unconscious in artistic creation. Not stopping at playing the game, artists used their products as a basis for study, investigating and analyzing the results of their experiments. All games listed below are found in A Book of Surrealist Games by Alastair Brotchie and Mel Gooding.
Automatic writing is the most direct of Surrealist technique.
Sit at a table with pen and paper put yourself in a receptive frame of mind and start writing, Continue writing without thinking about what is appearing beneath your pen, Write as fast as you can. Choose this letter at random before you begin, for instance a 't' and always begin this new sentence with a 't'. Although in the purest version of automatism nothing is corrected or rewritten, the unexpected material produced by this method can be used as the basis for further composition. What is crucial is the unpremeditated free-association that creates the basic text. Apart from the passage by Breton and Sonpault, the examples here have been re-worked to a greater or lesser extent.