Hello Art Murmur Patrons!

Thanks for coming by and playing, and thanks for checking out the site!

I’ll be posting the games this week; got to finish unpacking the ridiculous abundance of supplies I brought…

Whose photos are in that feed?

Apparently someone else on flickr has started using the “abstract chess” tag, and while I like the look of those works, they seem more expressionistic to me..?

Something will have to be done, by gum.

Fix: Changed the tag feed to “abstract chess game”

Lost some games submitted by others though, maybe…

Greetings Neuro-Aesthetes!

I hope you enjoyed the distribution set, & I hope you see the link between this project/game and the topic of the conference. We may be a long way off from understanding the role of mirror neurons in making judgments about other people’s perspectives… Certainly there’s as much spatial-position-processing involved in playing Abstract Chess as there is “action based inferences about the other.” But the distance from theory to knowledge makes fertile ground for speculation, don’t it?

Hello APE 2008 / Nixon Fans!

Hope you weren’t too creeped out by the deliveryman, and thanks for trusting a masked stranger!

The set you got is the last of the batch I printed for the Bizzarre Bazzar about 18 months ago, and the instructions have a sort-of-small-sort-of-a-big-deal typo…

No Questions Asked

If you found a leather briefcase with 30 or so capsules, containing crayons and cards and instruction sheets bearing this web address, you can redeem it all for 1$ per capsule and 20$ for the briefcase.  Maybe a meal, too, if there’s a good story about how you recovered the satchel from wherever the car thieves tossed it…

A Sailor Always Knows Which Way is Up

But can you tell which way it’s been turned?

According to the internet, Allied forces in World War I used cubist paintings to break up the silhouettes of warships.

Jim and Jamie Richter have the story at their website, along with many more photos. What you see above is an artist’s rendering, which I’ve cropped and spun around a little. They’ve got one shot of an actual vessel with the anti-pattern pattern. It would have been a sight to see… I supposed there’s room for a Battleship variant of Abstract Chess… Something with a cartesian plane, where moves are made by linear equations and html code?

Things that need doing

1. Upload the power-point

2. Write instructions for assembling a set

Hello Pandorans!

A few people may be finding their way here from the website of Pandora’s Trunk, a collective boutique and bazaar for the bizarre and beautiful. A few capsule sets were sold, and a few games were played, and it was a very pleasant time indeed. Also they were very nice about the fact that I was horrendously late.

And thanks to Rob for catching a few typos on the instruction sheets.  I guess since you found them, it’s your responsibility to fix them all, right Rob?  Right?

Hello, APE folk…

Post a pic of your game, ask a question about how to play, request another set of instructions or crayons…

And if you happened to catch any of the Spiegelman/Mouly panels on Saturday, and want to tell me about ‘em, please feel free, ’cause I sure wanted to catch ‘em, and I equally surely din’t.

Hello BarCampLA-ers…ites…ryans? Hmm…

Most of you were asleep, hung-over, or checking out the extremely neato hack-your-disposable-digital-camera presentation, so you missed my demo of this neat little game called abstract chess.

Abstract Chess is a fun game we used to play once upon a time in college, and it spread a little but never caught on the way werewolves did. I’ve been meaning to do up a nice presentation to introduce more people to it, and make some Abstract Chess sets as well, and BarCamp LA provided a viable deadline (and 3 person audience!)