Art Swipe vs StrangerStories

Art Swipe was developed by artist Jody Zellen and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) to coincide with the exhibition "In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States" on view at LACMA from January 29 - May 6, 2012. The app allows users to make collages from images that are in the public domain from LACMA's collection, images from the "In Wonderland" exhibition, as well as photographs from their camera and camera roll. Art Swipe is loosely based on the "exquisite corpses" created by early 20th century surrealist artists who would write or draw on a folded sheet of paper. Each participant would then pass the folded paper to the next participant for a further contribution. The result is a collective collage, an image made up of parts connected by chance.

Write a sentence. Pass it to a stranger. Stranger Stories pairs you with collaborators to build fiction one line at a time. You choose a world. You write a sentence. Someone picks it up and adds the next one. Back and forth until the story feels done. Then... the reveal. You see the full story for the first time. Inspired by the Surrealist tradition of blind collaboration... where artists created works without seeing what came before. Same principle, applied to storytelling. The constraint is the engine: you see only the last few sentences, so the story drifts, surprises, and becomes something no one could have written alone. Three ways to play: Paired. Two writers, one story, trading sentences back and forth. Unpredictable. Like a conversation with someone you'll never meet. Chain. One story passed forward through a crowd. You add a sentence and send it on. Check back in two days and the story is 47 sentences long and has gone somewhere you never imagined. Group. Invite your people. Create a private story, share a join code, and build something with friends, classmates, or colleagues. Choose blind mode for the surprise reveal, or open mode so everyone reads along as the story grows. Twenty-two Worlds to choose from... gothic, pastoral, mythic, noir, surreal, and more. Each one sets the tone so you and your collaborators are writing in the same register without ever exchanging a word. Every World comes with curated seed lines to spark the first sentence. Or write your own opener and let someone take it somewhere you didn't expect. All user contributions are text-only and moderated for safety. Content that violates community guidelines is flagged and removed. No ads. No data collection. No AI writing for you. No profiles, no followers, no social graph. The story is the only artifact. Human imagination is the original generative engine. This is a place to use it.