{games} – { feuilleton }

Chess players

Chess Problem 25 (13th century), from El Libro de los Juegos.

Chess-playing in art. Some of it, anyway. I hadn’t realised until I went searching for examples how many paintings there are of people playing chess. The prompt for this was my current reading, The Flanders Panel, a novel from 1990 by the Spanish author Arturo Pérez-Reverte. Arturo likes his art mysteries, as you’ll know if you’ve read The Club Dumas, an excellent novel that was reworked for cinema as The Ninth Gate. The chess game in The Flanders Panel is the subject of a painting by a fictional Flemish artist, Pieter Van Huys. Pérez-Reverte presents a biography of the artist and the three people depicted in the painting, with special attention given to the game of chess which gives the painting its title, a game which may or may not provide clues to a 15th-century murder mystery. Pérez-Reverte describes the painting itself in detail; Julia, the main character is a picture restorer so the descriptions extend to physical materials. Some of the novel’s cover designs have attempted to depict Van Huys’s picture, with unsuccessful results. There’s also a 1994 film adaptation, Uncovered, which I haven’t yet seen.

The Chess Player (no date) by Isidor Kaufmann.

I’ll admit to not having thought very much about chess-playing in art until the conversation in the novel turned to the subject of the painted game, and the question of whether or not the position of the pieces had anything to say about the people in the picture. (Pérez-Reverte helpfully includes a diagram that shows the layout of the board.) There’s no reason why a game of chess shouldn’t be used for semiotic reasons even if this is only to indicate the power relationship within a picture by making one party the dominant player. Given the ease with which this can be done I’d guess there are many such examples that use the game to communicate something about the players beyond the fact that they enjoy playing chess. If you’re painting a chess game you’re always going to be faced with the question of how you position the pieces, a problem that leads in turn to decisions about who should be shown to be winning or losing via the number of pieces and their placement on the board. Western art is replete with pictorial symbolism involving animals, plants, birds, colours, and so on; if the very old and very familiar game of chess is added to the symbolic repertoire then we’re left to decide which paintings are using the game for incidental reasons, and which have something more to communicate.

An Interesting Problem (no date) by Adolphe-Alexandre Lesrel.

In making a picture selection I’ve looked for paintings that clearly show the position of the pieces on the board, as well as those which depict the game with some accuracy. It becomes apparent when you examine many paintings on this subject that some artists don’t seem too familiar with the details of the game, a common error being the mispositioned board. This could also have a symbolic meaning, of course, but I’ll leave that question for others to explore. As a final note, Marcel Duchamp had a thing for chess.

Ein schwieriger Zug Öl auf Holz (no date) by Albert Joseph Franke.

Die Schachspieler (Faust und Mephisto) (1834) by Moritz Retzsch.

Continue reading “Chess players”

Weekend links 688

Ascending to the Cathedral, Barcelona (1938/1960) by Kati Horna.

• The rise and fall of Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong’s infamous urban monolith. Related: a four-and-a-half-hour walkthrough of Stray, a game in which you help a cat escape from a deteriorated robot-filled housing complex.

• Quote of the week: “The true master requires the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.” Thus Vladimir Nabokov at Lawrence Weschler’s Wondercabinet.

• New music: Orion Nebula by Christian Wittman, and Chthonic by Lawrence English & Lea Bertucci.

Chapter by chapter, Flaubert lampoons his poor pair, who fail at discipline after attempted discipline: landscape architecture, anatomy, history, literature, phrenology, religion, even love, and on and on. In each pursuit, they never lose the optimism or the hubris of thinking they can put their knowledge to work in the world. When they become interested in pedagogy, they adopt a pair of abandoned children who are at turns mystified by and contemptuous of their efforts to improve their well-being. The fruit trees fail, the novel is abandoned, a cat is boiled alive, the children cause scandals.

David Schurman Wallace explores the hazards of distraction with a detour through Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet

• At AnOther: Peter De Potter’s new book explores the erotic performance of social media.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Hobart LaRoche presents…15 experimental video games.

• Take a look at a book chronicling the albums of Island Records.

• At Colossal: Gabriel Schama’s laser-cut plywood reliefs.

• Orion (1986) by Metallica | Shades Of Orion (1993) by Shades Of Orion | Orion (2001) by Jah Wobble and Bill Laswell

Weekend links 588

Gerry Barney’s logo for British Rail. A page from the British Rail Corporate Identity Manual (1965).

• RIP Russ Kick, writer, editor, and founder of many websites/blogs such as Rare Erotica, Books Are People Too and (notoriously) the several iterations of The Memory Hole, a space dedicated to keeping visible information that successive US governments would have preferred to remain unseen. I’d known Russ remotely for many years, initially as a reviewer of the Savoy comics in Outposts. Savoy Books later helped find him a publisher for Psychotropedia: A Guide to Publications on the Periphery, a wide-ranging overview of alternative/underground print culture in the late 1990s. In 2004 his information activism gave him a fleeting taste of world-wide attention when he forced the Bush administration to make public the photos of flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq. The scandal put his name on the front pages of newspapers that should have been finding those photos for themselves instead of cheerleading the war. A run of books for Disinformation presented his archival researches for the general reader, then in 2012 he edited The Graphic Canon, a massive three-volume collection of comics and illustrations based on classic works of literature. I was among the many contributors to the latter with an adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and would have worked on the follow-up collection of crime stories if I hadn’t been busy with other things. I had hoped that we might work together again in the future.

• “‘The new mainstream has attempted to erase the innovations of the avant-garde from jazz history,’ the film declares.” Geeta Dayal reviews Fire Music, a documentary about the jazz innovations of the 1960s.

• I don’t have the hardware to play this but Sable is a new computer game from Raw Fury whose design owes much to the desert landscapes seen in comics by Moebius.

• New/old music: Stealing Sheep and The Radiophonic Workshop reimagine the score for René Laloux’s animated science-fiction film La Planète Sauvage.

• At Spine: Savannah Cordova on how to perfect your book cover’s typography. Having recently designed an all-type cover design this is timely.

• Mixes of the week: Isolatedmix 113 by Sunju Hargun, XLR8R Podcast 714 by Soela, and Holograficzne Widmo ze Bart De Paepe by David Colohan.

• “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Gerry Barney, designer of the British Rail logo, doesn’t like the green reworking of his design.

• Scottish lord goes blood simple: a teaser for The Tragedy of Macbeth by Joel Cohen and some bloke called William Shakespeare.

• “It’s unmanageable.” Ellen Peirson-Hagger on how the vinyl industry reached breaking point.

• Macbeth (1973) by John Cale | Rail (1994) by Main | Logotone (2013) by Steve Moore

Weekend links 587

Jetpac (1983) by Ultimate Play The Game. Lunar Jetman was the superior sequel but Jetpac had the better loading screen.

• RIP Clive Sinclair. Products made by Sinclair Research Ltd. were among the first electronic gadgets I owned: the Sinclair Scientific calculator which compelled you to learn Reverse Polish notation before you could use it; the ZX Spectrum computer, of course; and the pocket TV that came bundled with the computer, a machine with such feeble reception that it only ever worked outdoors. I’ve still got my Spectrum computer, and it still worked the last time I plugged it in although it’s hardly worth keeping when emulators proliferate. Spectacol for Android is a good example of the latter. Related: World of Spectrum; the early stages of the Spectrum design process by Sinclair designer Rick Dickinson; XL-1 by Pete Shelley, electro-pop with Spectrum-generated lyrics and graphics.

• Mixes of the week: A Lee “Scratch” Perry tribute mix by Dennis Bovell, and Blood Tide Station 1: Breakaway plus Blood Tide Station 2: Force of Life by The Ephemeral Man.

• “It’s not an easy time to be daring,” says Dennis Cooper, talking to Barry Pierce about his new novel, I Wished.

• London under London: Adam Zamecnik interviews Tom Chivers about searching for London’s lost rivers.

• New music: Ode To The Blue by Grouper, and A Shadow No Light Could Make by Nathan Moody.

• At Public Domain Review: 700 years of Dante’s Divine Comedy in art.

• At Wormwoodiana: The Mushroom Man—A Note on EC Large.

• DJ Food trips out with a collection of psychedelic drug posters.

• Nodnol (1969) by The Spectrum | Spectrum (1969) by The Tony Williams Lifetime | Spectrum (1973) by Billy Cobham

Rooms with a paranormal view

The Room: the cosmic tabletop.

A few words of praise for the Room series from Fireproof Games. I don’t play many computer games, and I think this may be my first post dedicated to such a thing, but I maintain an interest in the medium. The Room and its sequels only came to my attention a couple of weeks ago when I was wondering if there was anything Myst-like available for the tablet. I never got to play the original Myst but enjoyed its follow up, Riven, although the enjoyment was mostly for the graphics, the music and the island environments. The game itself was less satisfying, requiring pen and paper to keep track of its complexities, and involving a great deal of fruitless journeying from one location to another in the search for new clues.

The Room 2: the camera.

The Room follows the template established by Myst in presenting you with a number of mechanical artefacts, all of which have to be examined and opened or operated before you can proceed to the next stage. The dominant aesthetic is 19th-century-mechanical—there’s a lot of wood and brass to these devices—but to call it steampunk would be a mistake; there’s little steam involved, and most of the cogs are kept inside their cases. There is a hint of Jules Verne, however, in the notes from an absent inventor whose initials, “A.S.”, may be a nod to Journey to the Centre of the Earth. As the title suggests, the location is a single room, while in the sequels, The Room 2 and The Room 3, you’re presented with a series of connected spaces. The third installment is the closest to the original Myst with a central hub that leads to other areas of a rambling complex of buildings, not all of which are revealed at the outset. The main structure is based on William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey which pushes things into Gothic territory even without the developments outlined below.

The Room 3: the oscilloscope is one of several which need to be powered up and manipulated in order to open the Null portals.

The MacGuffin for all the games is a new element, the Null, whose discovery and potential obsesses the creators of the games’ devices, and whose manipulation of space creates many of the portals that lead to new rooms. As the series progresses, the Null becomes a growing menace that leads to full-on cosmic horror, with oil-slick Tentacles From Beyond writhing around the interdimensional portals you have to travel through. This development was surprising and, for this player, very welcome, turning the games from a series of eleborate puzzles into something much more sinister. The aesthetic evolves accordingly, with an increasing profusion of occult sigils and pentacles, and, in The Room 2, Tarot cards and séance devices. (Fireproof have a set of their Tarot designs available as a free download.) In the second game there’s a further requirement to piece together mundane machines—a camera or a typewriter, say—before they will function properly. This process reaches a peak in The Room 3 where you’re faced with a succession of increasingly complex tasks, from woodworking and metal forging to electro-mechanical engineering and astronomy. As with the Myst universe, there are no monsters here (although there is the occasional ghost), nothing needs to be fought with weapons, it’s just you, a room full of objects and a continual background murmur of unnerving whispers and distant sounds. The gameplay in The Room 3 is sufficiently non-linear to lead to a variety of different endings, not all of which may be survivable. I managed to escape the Tentacles From Beyond when they finally destroyed the house but I also missed finding an important artefact. I’ll be returning, wiser and, I hope, more attentive to the half-hidden details.

The Room—Old Sins: the haunted doll’s house as seen at the beginning of the game.

I’m currently playing the fourth game in the series, Old Sins, which returns you to a single room but plays with scale via a large doll’s house. The exterior of the building is all detailed model work, while the interiors—accessed through Null physics—are scaled-down replicas of the rooms in a house where another Null investigator and his wife have gone missing. It’s not clear yet whether the attic where the toy house is stored is also the attic of the real house the model is based upon but having dealt with a similar model in The Room 3 this seems likely.

While I enjoyed the surface details of Riven I was never very interested in the fantasy background of the Myst universe. The Room series is much closer to my own core preoccupations, a beguiling blend of antique technology with borderline occultism and those Tentacles From Beyond, a scenario that wouldn’t be out of place in an issue of Weird Tales. Just the thing for the darkening days of October.