autumn-and-eve:
I suck at chess but whatever it’s for fucking fascist feudalists anyway
Kings and queens? Bullshit
In anarchist chess every piece would be able to function a variety of ways based on the consensus of the other pieces and white wouldn’t be able to initiate force against black anyway
amouthygirl:
Autumn is onto something here.
autochthones:
“Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the State apparatus in the context of the theory of games. let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with a relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: ‘It’ makes a move. ‘It’ could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases. Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary’s pieces: their functioning is structural. On the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only.”
Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
sterwood:
I really need to learn how to play Go. Lately it’s just been cribbage, all day, every day, but Go would be a welcome change.
amouthygirl:
They beat you to it, Autumn.
becoming-wave:
Chess sucks. Go is a far more elegant, subtle, flirtateous game, vastly more complex, yet amenable to an intuitive style of play. I feel my way around the board, seeking positions of influence responsive to they lay of the land and the style of the opponent, rather than coming in with a head full of predetermined strategic sets to deploy. I wish more people played Go so I could have Go partners. My poor board and pieces have sat idle for lack of opponents to play with.
For anyone who wants to learn, this is a great resource. And beyond that, KGS Go server is an excellent site to practice on, with plenty of opponents at all levels and lots who like to teach. And if any Toronto friends are down, I’d love to play IRL.
Do y’all know about the abstract wargame by Guy Debord and Alice Becker-Ho?
I’m more of the backgammon type nowadays though—I want the bluffing game in with my tactics.
Kathryn Janeway and Chakotay often go on away missions together, although the captain isn’t supposed to beam down at all, according to policy—it’s dangerous. But they needed to make sure we knew that she was headstrong and no-nonsense, and of course put her into preventable danger again.
A pretty typical scenario is the time that they retreated into a tunnel to keep warm and alive in a hostile atmosphere and ended up stumbling upon a hatching alien egg which they had to parent. The rocks are made of ugly styrofoam or fibreglass and never look like actual rocks, in drab greenish-grey tones. Before discovering the child, they use their phasers to seal the tunnel entrance in a controlled rockfall—which turns out to be a bad idea. They probably wouldn’t have survived the Northwest Passage.
The New Works gallery also smelled a little like fresh paint, which was a nice touch. Probably won’t last though.
The centrepiece of today’s activities—after introductions, discussion, and a brief chat about publishing led by John Shelling—was an afternoon excursion, in groups, to art galleries and other sites downtown, about which we were to write short review fragments. Here’s one of mine.
Brendan McGillicuddy’s Anthropocene is up at the AGA until July 1.
The episode is actually about Neelix and Tom Paris. I didn’t have wifi in the AGA basement to confirm my vague memories.
latitude53:
This weekend we’re looking forward to a special project we’ve put together with our recent Writer-in-residence Megan Bertagnolli, and the support of the Edmonton Arts Council. Who are we writing for? is a weekend-long workshop about art writing in this city—we’ve invited a group of local writers as well as BlackFlash magazine editor John Shelling to discuss, write and develop their vision of art writing in Edmonton and beyond. Curious? Meet the participants on Friday night at Andrew Forster’s opening reception, and follow the workshop blog at writers.latitude53.org.
We’re doing this thing this weekend. It will be a chance for me to develop some thoughts that I’ve been thinking.
Sunday night fighting werewolves at the Empress, NBD.
Not letting Canadian cheese prices get me down.
It’s a bit of a shadow. I was gesturing with my notebook for some reason at the ARTery on Saturday, at a art-show party (it’s not clear if it was an opening or a one-night show—the Facebook event didn’t say). One of the artists didn’t want me to—I sort of understand; there was some terrible stuff. I might be breaking my word; I don’t remember how I responded. I do remember Kristy saying “do it, do it”.
One of the first things I wrote for Vue Weekly back in 2009 was about a show co-curated by Amelia Aspen, whose drawing is up on the wall this week. I didn’t like it very much and I flatter myself with the idea that there were some ruffled feathers about it. Small circles. Lots of people have asked me if I am writing now though. Or planning on it. I tell them I don’t know—that goes for lots of other questions about the moment too. “We’ll see.” It’s nice when they are enthusiastic.
I thought about it a lot when I first got to Glasgow, assumed that that’s what I would be doing. But it didn’t seem as necessary. I spent lots of time at work complaining about The Skinny, being slightly awkward because of small circles that I hadn’t seen all of. I never met the arts editor/main writer for them (their problems go way deeper though—it would have taken some dramatic format changes to improve), I don’t remember if I slagged his writing in conversation with Jac who writes for them sometimes. But there were lots of writers working in different categories, especially all of the “creative” stuff. I miss it.
I still smile when I think about Edmontonian reactions were to Scott Rogers writing in the Glasgow house style for our show. I never saw the show, it was when I was covering at Latitude 53 “for a couple of weeks” from a distance.
This year was going to be different though, that was the plan: I was sort of comfortable with the place, maybe enough to write too. Before I figured out that I was being an artist I was awkwardly trying to find a justification to write, but I think I just needed some time.
This weekend it sounds like I’m missing a lot of good stuff over there.
Edmonton’s dirty spring is in full swing.
At the ARTery I had another conversation. The space is changing, new owners, who knows what. We talked about how it kind of sucked for visual art anyway, I don’t think it’ll be remembered for that. But I fell into talking about my subject two weeks ago: those complaints of inaccessibility in Vancouver. At least it makes people aim high, I said. Because in poor edmonton they just get Curtis Ross to put up some drawings for some reason. There was something in there about the danger of curating your friends too: “We Are The Golden West” is just some people, you know. I don’t know why you would put up a show if you didn’t want people to talk about it. And if they’re talking, why shouldn’t they write?
That post two weeks ago: someone described it as very Edmonton. I don’t know what to say; I’m aware of something about what I’m performing, partly naïveté. I go back and forth about what it means, though. I miss the feeling of having peers who you can see are working on the same stuff as you but are a little bit ahead (this makes me sound like an asshole).
I just don’t feel very attached here right now. I’m waiting for the summer, I guess—that seems silly though, too. I should make up my mind. I procrastinate about sending applications. But it’s hard to put in the investment to write when I know I’m going to be disappointed, like I have been at almost every show I’ve gone to see here this spring. I actually couldn’t bear to write an article about “We Are The Golden West – New Work Art Exhibition”, or any of the stuff I saw tonight at another artist-run centre. It’d be awful. So everybody sort of wanders about without committing to anything except for complaining about how outrageous it is that the Wildrose party seems to be exactly what we all expected it to be what a surprise. Small circles.
The best bit was the part that felt like a secret.
It seemed like a pretty sad way for the ARTery to go out, anyway.
Dirt City¦Dream City is a collaborative effort with fourteen of Edmonton’s most talented artists and artist/curator Kendal Henry to create site-specific public artworks throughout the Quarters district. These collaborations will delve into the past, look to the future, wallow in the grit and radiate in the sometimes-hidden beauty that is alluring and unique to the Quarters to conceive provocative and innovative public interventions. These celebratory and challenging works can be experienced this summer between July 20 and July 30, 2012 throughout the Quarters Downtown.
Open house: May 5th at the ARTery, 12–5. With Kendal Henry and artists Aaron Paquette, Adam Waldron-Blain, Andrew Buszchak, Carly Greene, Destiny Swiderski, Emily Van Driesum, Holly Newman, Jackson McConnell, Jes McCoy, Jill Stanton, Mackenzy Albright and Rachelle Bowen, Matt Prins, Nickelas Johnson and Tiffany Shaw-Collinge.
