chess

chess (chès), game for two players played on a square board composed of 64 small squares, alternately dark and light in color. Each player is provided with 16 pieces, or chessmen, either white or black. Various pieces are set down in a designated order in the two ranks closest to the player. Each piece is moved according to specific rules and is removed from the board when it is displaced by the move of one of the opposing pieces into its square. The objective in chess is to checkmate, or trap, the opponent's king, a piece whose mobility is limited. Chess probably originated in India. By the 13th cent. it was played throughout Europe. The first modern international chess tournament was held in London in 1851. There have been recognized world chess champions since that time, and since the 1970s championship matches, such as those in which Bobby FISCHER took the title from Boris Spassky, Anatoly KARPOV defeated Viktor KORCHNOI, and Gary KASPAROV defeated Karpov and Nigel Short, have received worldwide media coverage.

Several metaphysicians (Crowley, Shallis, Carroll, etc.) have suggested that chess is really a medieval computer simulacrum, a magical model of the world, or of Time, in which various forces confront one another. The black and white squares are happenings of evil mixed with good. The pieces are fixed stages of mental development. The pawns are ordinary mentalities, with few choices open to them, who can move but forward in hope of eventual enlightenment (embodied in the queen). The knight is the initiate, the bishop ecclesiastical power, the castle or rook temporal power. The king, of course, is the inner self or life-force revealed at death or apotheosis, depending on whether one wins or loses. One's opponent king is the source of the tyranny of the outside world, the "other" that the self must battle. Originally the game was played with four players, each having four pieces and four pawns - with no queens.

Ithell Colquhoun notes that Yeats and the Celts before him (fidchell) had a chessboard representing the four gates to the cities of the four elements and in which the squares were cromlechs - mystic, upright stones. Gwenddolen, in Arthurian legend, is said to have possessed an enchanted chessboard that played by itself.

I

In their serious corner, the players move the gradual pieces.  The board detains them until dawn in its hard compass: the hatred of two colors.

In the game, the forms give off a severe magic: Homeric castle, gay knight, warlike queen, king solitary, oblique bishop, and pawns at war.

Finally, when the players have gone in, and when time has eventually consumed them, surely the rites then will not be done.

In the east, this war has taken fire. Today, the whole earth is its provenance. Like that other, this game is for ever.

II

Tenuous king, slant bishop, bitter queen, straightforward castle and the crafty pawn-- over the checkered black and white terrain they seek out and enjoin their armed campaign.

They do not realize the dominant hand of the player rules their destiny. They do not know an adamantine fate
governs their choices and controls their journey.

The player, too, is captive of caprice (the sentence is Omar's) on another ground crisscrossed with black nights and white days.

God moves the player, he, in turn, the piece. But what god beyond God begins the round of dust and time and dream and agonies?

- JORGE LUIS BORGES

• 8x8 =64 squares
• Humphrey Bogart was an expert chess player and played for stakes
• The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat", which means "the king is dead".
• According to Pope Innocent III, it was not a crime to kill someone after a game of chess.
• Bobby Fischer
• Aleister Crowley
• Marcel Duchamp

Alan Turing and Claude Shannon were altogether serious in their interest in chess, because of the complexity of the game in relation to the simplicity of its rules, and because they suspected that the shortcut needed to perform this kind of time-consuming search-procedure would also be a clue to the way brains solved all sorts of problems.

A chess playing program was also interesting because it was a relative of the kind of informational entities known as automata that John von Neumann and Turing had been toying with. Once again, like Turing's universal machines, these automata were theoretical devices that did not exist at that time, but were possible to build, in principle. For years, Shannon experimented with almost absurdly simple homemade versions--mechanical mice that were able to navigate simple mazes.

 - Howard Rheingold - _Tools For Thought_

piece: _Chess Set_ by Yves Tanguy 

Atari 8bit videogame _Archon_

Archon takes a new and different spin on the idea of chess. Rather than simply having pieces capture each other by moving onto the same square, pieces that occupy the same spot actually battle for control. Attacking doesn't necessarily mean that you will win the square, and in defense, you can slaughter your enemy's incoming army.

Even more, this battle between Light and Dark takes place on a magical playing field. Each army has a spellcaster capable of powerful magical spells that can shift the tide of battle. As the game plays, certain squares cycle from white to black and back again. Dark pieces are much stronger on dark squares, while Light pieces are more powerful on lighter squares.

You can win by slaughtering the entire opposing army or by capturing the five power points that exist on the board.

Each piece in the two armies has strengths and weaknesses. No piece is so strong that it is invulnerable to everything, and no piece is so weak as to be useless. Every piece can move a certain number of squares on the chess board in any direction. Flying pieces are able to move over both friendly and enemy units.

The main game takes place on a black and white chess board, which is nine squares by nine instead of the normal eight by eight. The spellcasters each stand on one of the power points at the start of the game, while the other three are lined up along the middle of the board.

When two pieces occupy the same square, the view shifts to a battle screen where the two can fight for domination. Victorious pieces claim the square for their army. Wounds are real, however, and a weakened piece can often be easily killed by another attack. These wounds heal slowly over time.  
 

• release _Queen To Bishop IV_ by Tummler on Man's Ruin (2000)
• 2. _Armadillo_ MP3
• 6. _Blatant Disregard For The Untamed Void_ MP3
• track _Chessboards_ MP3 by Killing Joke off of _Brighter Than 1000 Suns_

Maryhill, Washington - Sam Hill Museum
3/31/98 - This museum is located in the middle of nowhere it seems off the bank of the Columbia River on the border of Oregon and Washington.  I was there because I was visiting my girlfriend at the time,  and also to check out the full size Stonehenge replica built by Sam Hill on the banks.  a great site for a party.  anyway, I decided to check out the museum, and I was surprised to find a very interesting collection of chess boards and chess pieces.  a very pleasant find.  - @Om* 5/19/00
  

film _2001: A Space Odyssey_ DVD (1968) directed by Stanley Kubrick

The chess position and moves that we see are from a game played in 1913 in Hamburg between two undistinguished players named Roesch and Schlage.
 
 

film _War Games_ (vhs/ntsc)

• Joshua likes to play chess.  

in the film _Aliens_ (vhs/ntsc)(1986), a chess related visual pun is performed when the "queen" takes "Bishop".
  

IBM Deep Blue defeats Grandmaster Gary Kasparov.  Afterwards Kasparov comments on a particular move by Deep Blue that it was "eerily human".

•  track _Kasparov's Revenge_ MP3 by Lo Fidelity Allstars

In June 1992, the new single _Blue Room_ MP3 hit the British Top Ten. The longest single in chart history at just under 40 minutes, it earned the Orb a spot on Top of the Pops, where they ruminated over a chess game and waved at the camera while a three-minute edit of the single played in the background.

• track _Ajedrez I y II (Chess I and II) for voice and piano_ by Juan María Solare (1986)
• This piece is based upon a two-part poem by the Argentinean Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) titled Ajedrez from the collection _El Otro, El Mismo_ (The Self and the Other).
• in 1920, Man Ray designed his first chess set
• Anomalog:
  • Human Sized Chess Performance On The Lower East Side
  • Kasparov vs. Komputer In VR
  • Chess Boxing World Championship
• electro track _Check Mate_ MP3 (192k) by Elecktroids off of _Elektroworld_ CD on Warp #035 (1995)
• IDM track _Datacubes_ MP3 (vK) by Benge off of _Silicon Valleys_ CD on Quartermass #103 (1999)
• cover depicts Apple IIe, telephone, travel chess set, & adding machine
• sample: "after seven steps of purification, we have the protein and water solution, which we can keep for many weeks to months prior to putting it into our data cubes."

• tech-house track _Time Strategies_ MP3 (192k) by Hakan Lidbo off of _Before The Beginning_ CD on April Records #39 (1999)
• from an interview: "Part 2 is called _Time Strategies_ because I think that this piece of music (and perhaps music in general) holds similarities with a chess game where you, especially in the opening and ending sections of the game, have to organise your components and the time available as efficient and strategic as possible, fantasy being most important in the middle of the game. The musical components - sound objects, phrases, structures, etc. - can also be regarded as chessmen, each with different charges and strength."
• track _Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring)_ MP3 (34:45) by Igor Stravinsky (1913)
• In the book, _Nicholas Roerich: Messenger of Beauty_ (published by Inner Trad 1994), Jacqueline Decter recounts a story of how Roerich offered Stravinsky two possible scenarios for a new ballet: "A Game of Chess" or "The Great Sacrifice". Stravinsky chose "The Great Sacrifice" for what was to become _Le Sacre du Printemps_.
• 1924 - Autumn. A chess game between Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp is filmed by Francis Picabia and Ren Clair in Entr'acte.
• avant garde short film _At Land_ (vhs/ntsc) (1944) by Maya Deren - features chess games
• 604 track _The Pawn_ MP3 by Logic Bomb
• samples from Leonard Nimoy on an episode of _In Search Of..._ :
• "flying saucers - were they fact or fantasy?"
• "observable from only a great height, is this a canvas... "; "...modern pagan gods? "
• "ancient travellers from the stars..."
• "handed down from generation to generation..."
• "energy, resources..."
• "remarkable incident in the himalayas.."
• track _Reunion_ by John Cage
• This piece was performed in 1968 at Ryerson Polytechnic in Toronto. Lowell Cross constructed a chess board equipped with photoreceptors that served as a gating mechanism to transmit or cut off sound produced by other musicians and to control lights. John Cage and Marcel Duchamp played a game of chess. Other participants included Teeny Duchamp, David Tudor, Gordon Mumma, and David Behrman. The book Marcel Duchamp and John Cage by Shigeko Kubota (1970) contains photographs and a recording of this performance.
• Stanley Kubrick played chess for money at the Marshal and Manhattan clubs and in Washington Square park in Greenwich Village.
• track _Suasive Chess Strategy_ MP3 (192k) by Venetian Snares off of _Shiver In Eternal Darkness_
• samples HAL from _2001: A Space Odyssey_ DVD: "would you like to play a game of chess?"

citrus chess @ LACMA  11/14/01
 
 

pOrtal:
Chess

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