Very excited to be hosting a new response to the Chessbard! Adam Seelig and his two sons Arlo and Shai communally played a game against the ChessBard and wrote a beautiful poem in response to the works and the process of playing. Check it out!
As well, Jody and Aaron did a two part interview with E. Martin Nolan over at the Town Crier. You can find part I here and part II here.
While you’re here, why not play a game or three?
Over under Responses there is a collection of the ChessBard’s games versus students from Jason Boyd’s English 921 class at Ryerson University. Visit the page to download and read the .pdf!
Aaron was very excited to give a talk to Dr. Jason Boyd’s “Narrative in a Digital Age” on August 16th centered around the ChessBard. The talk itself contextualized the piece within past computer-writing projects and conceptual poetry before opening up the ChessBard to the students. It is deeply exciting then that a tournament was held and the results of which will be published shortly. Thanks to all the students who participated!
If you’re looking to keep up on all things ChessBard, you can also like our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/chessbard.
The ChessBard is alive! We are extremely happy to have Gary Barwin as the first writer to respond to the ChessBard. Here’s a sample:
There is a minimalist variational elegance in the shapes of the pieces. In the simple binary pairs of white/black, light/shadow, win/lose. In the alternating turns. In the endless ontological or metaphysical narrative variation of beginning/ending. Life/death. In the relation of the pieces to the real world (castle, rook, knight, bishop, queen.) To dance, war, strategic intrigue, molecules, literature, music. A two-tone slow-motion soccer of the mind. How much is chess in the physical world and how much of it is in the imagination? Its richly unfolding patterns of play. The universe of chess unfolds on the universe/page/world/map/dimensionality of the chessboard.
When I think of chess, I can’t help thinking of Marcel Duchamp, Machiavelli, Heisenberg, Wittgenstein. Sherlock Holmes. Lao Tzu.
Check out the full page to see the poems he generated and the writing he’s done in response!
Make sure to also visit the translator and the playable version while you’re here!
As we get ever closer to polishing the site and getting online, we encourage you to keep checking back for special guest writers and adjustments/improvements to both the Chessbard translator and the playable version of the Chesssbard.
Many thanks to Greg Lord for all the amazing design work on the site. This project also had a large helping hand from the Center for Digital Humanities at Ryerson University
If there are any problems with the site, you want to contribute writing or you just want to ask questions, please email Aaron at atucker[at]ryerson[dot]ca.
