Inspiration
I found myself thinking about the current state of political discourse—how it often feels chaotic, random, and almost nonsensical. Arguments and personas could go totally random, as if different parts have been stitched together to form a strange new whole.
This immediately brought to mind ancient myths, like the 人头马身 (the centaur), a creature with the head and torso of a human and the body of a horse. This became my core visual metaphor: what if I could create political “centaurs”? I could randomly pair the heads of recognizable political figures with symbolic, abstract bodies to represent the absurdity and randomness of political rhetoric.
The project needed a name that captured this idea. I was inspired by the Surrealist parlor game, “Exquisite Corpse,” where artists collaboratively draw a figure without seeing the other sections. My program does something similar, but with political figures, or “candidates.” The name clicked almost instantly: Exquisite Candidate.
Description
Exquisite Candidate is an interactive artwork that explores the chaotic nature of political identity. By clicking the mouse, the viewer generates a new “candidate”—a hybrid figure composed of a randomly selected head and a randomly selected body.
The heads are abstract but recognizable vector drawings of political figures. The bodies are symbolic and thematic, representing concepts like power (“suit”), vulnerability (“stripped_down”), foolishness (“sheep”), or emotional immaturity (“baby with tears”). The resulting combinations are surprisingly (at least for me the creator) humorous or poignant, creating a visual commentary on the fragmented and performative nature of public personas. To bring these abstract figures to life, Gemini helped me generate part of the many vector-based drawing functions for the assets.
Code
The program is built on an Object-Oriented structure with three main classes: Head, Body, and Creature. This keeps the code clean, organized, and easy to expand.
The most interesting challenge I encountered was with the “baby with tears” body. My initial design was simple: the Body object would draw itself, and the Head object would draw itself. But the tears needed to be drawn on the face, which is part of the Head object. How could the Body object know where the head was going to be drawn? Unfortunately, until submission, I haven’t figured out how to implement this successfully.