[Wolfgang von Kempelen / The Mechanical Turk / 1770]

The process of rating players can be compared to the measurement of the position of a cork bobbing up and down on the surface of agitated water with a yard stick tied to a rope and which is swaying in the wind. - Arpad Elo, 1962.

Attack and sacrifice, leveraging territory, the rhythm of the gestures made by two opponents—chess is a game of constant interpolation. It is also a game of savagery, negotiation, nuance and subterfuge. These descriptions can also be applied to the crafting of narrative as authors practice the same incremental orchestration to construct convincing and immersive environments and experiences—possible worlds. To this end Cabinet magazine recently published Reading to the Endgame, an ingenious project by D. Graham Burnett & W.J. Walter capable of translating the contents of a novel into a crude chess algorithm. This has allowed the pair of ludic and literary researchers to use a chess board as a proving grounds on which to pit works of fiction against one another.

[Voyage au Centre de La Terre (white) vs. Sense and Sensibility]

In developing their system Burnett & Walter took the rows on a chessboard (labeled as 1-8 in chess annotation) and assigned the letters i-p to this axis. So, an opening move of e4 would register as ej-el. Reading to the Endgame is powered by these pairs of two letter combinations (called tuples) that demarcate the start and end point of a given move. The chess algorithm reads the source novels, scanning for tuples that trigger possible moves and, in proceeding through the texts the game develops. The system employs Stylometrics, a stylistic analysis of authorial voice ("sentence length, word and letter frequency, and other quantitative attributes ?of their prose") to arrange the tuples favoured by each author on the board so that their novel would theoretically (if a little haphazardly) play to control the centre of the board. The system is about as precise as it could be and in moving beyond a technical analysis of the algorithm and text analysis methodology, the project poses some interesting questions:

• Could the tendencies, deployment of and prose describing specific characters be used to trigger attacks? How might secondary or tertiary characters within a novel relate to specific chess pieces or combinations? For example, in scrambling to protect his "King" Don Quixote, would Sancho Panza have an affinity with the striking power of a bishop or the nonlinear mobility of a knight?
• Since chess features a typology of opening moves what would be the more common opening sequences generated by Burnett & Walter's system? What authors tend to build solid openings? How would these openings relate to the introductory chapters of the novels in question?

Admittedly these questions all fold back on themselves and thinking about this project in relation to narrative (on top of style/syntax) might be a misguided exercise - simply too open-ended to be productive. In framing their system, Burnett & Walter gravitate towards an oulipian endgame—noting the challenge of determining the tuples required to "defeat" a novel and then heeding these constraints and writing a counter-novel that is an effective delivery device for this encoded information. The pair of researchers have also devoted considerable energy to pitting canonical works against one another and this is exemplified by an unlikely altercation between Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Metamorphosis.

In facilitating these "impossible encounters" the game of chess becomes an interface through which to visualize and evaluate the stylistic idiosyncrasies of selected novels. There are other examples of chess being used as a translation machine, one that immediately springs to mind is Reunion, the famous collaboration between John Cage and Marcel Duchamp that took place in Toronto in the late 1960s.

[Marcel Duchamp, Teeny Duchamp and John Cage playing chess / photo: Shigeko Kubota]

On March 5, 1968, an event entitled Reunion was held at Ryerson University (then Ryerson Polytechnic). Organized by John Cage, Reunion featured performances by David Tudor, Gordon Mumma and David Behrma. The feature attraction at this event was a series of chess matches between Cage and Marcel Duchamp on a board custom designed by Lowell Cross. Cross' chessboard was wired to detect which squares on the board were occupied and as the game progressed various sound and light events would be triggered. A 2002 article in Tout-Fait describes the operation of the board as follows:

When Teeny and Marcel Duchamp took turns playing chess with Cage on the stage, the pre-modulated photoreceptors served as a gating mechanism to receive messages of movements and to transmit sound and light. Depending on the moves of the chess pieces, the sound was cut off or rerouted to generate a kind of random music by means of the pre-configured chance operation of two "intellectual minds."

While there is obviously nothing aleatoric about developing pieces in a chess game there is an incredible complexity to the arrangement of all the pieces on the board over time. Pawn structure, combinations, fork attacks, the pressure of the endgame - these events provided a matrix of inputs that modulated sound and light. Cross' reconfiguration of the chessboard had turned it into a pre-MIDI media controller, one that gave form to the immaterial, collaborative construction implicit in a match of chess. In some regards this project could be considered a step backwards for chess, by "dumbing down" the poetry of positions and making play not only aural, but retinal. Regardless, Reunion was probably as inclusive as a public chess match could be as it invited the audience "into" the game - translating the cognitive labour and duration of play into a sound and light show, a public spectacle.

Sadly, there is not too much information about Reunion available online. Those interested in a definitive account of the endeavour should track down "Reunion: John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Electronic Music and Chess", an article written by Cross for Leonardo Music Journal in 1999.

[Chessmachine performed at MUTEK 2004 / photo: unknown8bit]

Many of the ideas central to Reunion were revisited at a MUTEK 2004 performance by Richard Chartier and CoH (Ivan Pavlov) entitled Chessmachine. This collaboration reconsidered the sound/image/play synthesis of Reunion in the era of laptop performance while addressing the cultural role of chess in the 20th century. The original statement for Chessmachine described the interplay of Pavlov and Chartier as alluding to

…the historical confrontation of East and West; an austere and chilling tete-a-tete over the chessboard that reconstructs the somber milieu of a bygone Europe, even as it conveys a kind of absurdist levity through the rehearsed performance of these roles. The use of MAC and PC computer operating systems by Chartier and Pavlov, respectively, becomes the late-20th century manifestation of classic Cold War combatants. Through their engagement, a process of sonic and aesthetic displacement unfolds, such that one player's strategic manipulation of sound begins slowly to affect and then determinatively shape the compositional technique of the other. Chessmachine's live performances take place in real time with color coded staging, uniforms, lighting, and video projections designed by Russian-American installation/video artists Evelyn Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand.

With this performance we are zooming out from the confines of a specific auditorium and considering international relations, the theatrics of confrontation and even the ideological battle between operating systems - high stakes indeed. I found a review of this performance written by TJ Norris for Igloo Magazine that illustrates the adversarial nature of the collaboration.

Pavlov created unusually brash and darkly tinged noise that flowed like blood coursing erratically, while Chartier started out quite methodical, like an engine purring around your ears in Sensurround. Pavlov’s hollow tin, open and wide sounds were beefy in comparison with Chartier’s smoldering fire that burned fiercely like active hot coals like an imposing, sinister flash fire awaiting its rapture. Pavlov’s big sound rolled on like gigantic metal ball bearings with a crisp serrated static that caused a wired tone of feedback as if they were being bent out of maladjusted radio wires… Chartier cautiously bided his time and fought back with a hailstorm of power static that blossomed fluidly and seemed impulsively generated by Pavlov’s anxious state of getting up off his seat and walking to stage left.

Given that this summary reads like a report on sonic warfare, Chartier and Pavlov have to be commended for harnessing the vicious, win-at-all-costs spirit of chess. It is also interesting to consider this collaboration as a commentary on the disembodied, cerebral nature of laptop-driven performance—I've seen many laptop "groups" that are about as (visually) arresting as a chess match. There is a live recording available on the LINE imprint documenting a 2005 presentation of this project at REDCAT in Los Angeles - I'm eager to track this release down.

Reading to the Endgame, Reunion and Chessmachine all test and extend the manner in which chess functions as an arena where conflict yields form. Each of these chess machines redeploys the combinatorial language of the game towards new ends - for stylistic comparisons of narrative and multimedia performance. Since I already quoted Nabokov earlier this month, I'd like to close this post with another excerpt from The Defense in which a young Luzhin discovers the paralysis of a game that cannot be completed.

"Well, well, it's a draw" said the old man. He moved his Queen back and forth a few times the way you move the lever of a broken machine and repeated: "A draw. Perpetual check." Luzhin also tried the lever to see if it would work, wiggled it, wiggled it, and then sat still staring stiffly at the board.