The only superfluous things in my room when I got here were a chess set in a wooden box and an antique round table with a checker board beneath the glass.
Yesterday I saw a painting at Berlin Art Projects by Bernard Ammerer where some kids are standing on a white gridded plane. Graphic trees denote a forest off to one side with the text “Wald” overlaid. The paint handling is descriptive at best, but I was interested in the digital quality of the space – sterile and boundless. A chess set with an infinite possibility of coordinates to jump to if only you knew the right combination of > s and # s.
If cyber space is a white checkered playing field, then all moves are possible. One can compose anything from the endless store of re-combinable pixels. This is the idea at the core of Second Life, where you construct an alternate online persona and environment from scratch. Their website entices, “Who will you meet in Second Life? Where will you explore? Who will you be?”
Yet, in the painting, the boys are portrayed as real while the landscape around them is just a stand-in. To me, its artificiality undercuts the wonders of exploring and manipulating it. Why pour time into constructing something that is a mimic of the real? In terms of Plato’s forms, wouldn’t a virtual world be one further away from the world that we experience – a shadow on the wall of the cave? Or am I missing something?
In the painting, instead of exploring the forest, one of the boys lifts up the side of a white square, like a ceiling tile. Below, it is dark and hard to make out but one gets the sense that the underworld is rich with dirt and growing things.
(Sorry for hyper-crappy photo of newspaper reproduction of painting. No the sky isn't wrinkled. I'd go back and photograph it in person but it's a gale storm out there and I can't risk it.)
The digital playing field in Alexander McQueen’s 2005 show, “It’s Only a Game,” is a stunning computer/reality hybrid. I was mesmerized by the video when I saw it at the MET recently. The fashion show entails models decked in Alice in Wonderland battle garb playing chess. Their board is lit up like a monitor with squares that brighten to direct the players. An omnipresent computer generated voice calls out each move – D7 to F4. The outfits are a stunning combination of sports gear, Marie Antoinette ornament and storybook filigree. One by one, the pawns are captured. Although their feet obey each command, defiance burns behind their butterflied eyelashes and they stomp rather than strut offstage. Instead of humans dressed as objects, they feel like robots that have developed a little too much attitude and are getting tired of being remote controlled.
The title, “It’s Only a Game,” rings sardonic. The pawns’ semi-consciousness paired with their absence of free will is unnerving. The voice has absolute power but no face. It calls into question who or what is playing chess and what are the stakes?
Watch “It’s Only a Game”: (If I knew the first thing about computers I would be able to plop this video down right here in the blog. Baby steps.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5gY5DXrb48
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