Automatic Self Portraits

The Book of Surrealist Games contains a multitude of mindless ways to provoke your multitudinous minds — like blind automatic writing question and answers; fake advertising campaigns for random objects; activities that move participants through space and time to explore their emotions.

Sometimes those games designed by Dali, Magritte, and other surrealists inspire your own game creation. That’s how these automatic self portraits were born.

The game goes like this. First, grab a willing partner. Then, close your eyes and tightly hold a pen to a blank page. Let your partner hold your hand and move it around to make a drawing. They can draw whatever they like. The images here are portraits of the closed-eye subjects. Switch roles and draw a picture of your own using your blinded partner’s hand.

Above is an example of a portrait, drawn, in a way, with the face-owner’s own hand (but more so by the partner’s).

Below is the reverse. Good, bad, ugly, beautiful, flattering or not; no matter what, you’ll both have a hand in your drawings.