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the london games festival is currently underway up in the capital. i’ve been to one of their fringe events tonight, the public rediscovery of a game invented some 30 years ago and nearly forgotten save for the intervention of publishing house altas books. the game is guy debord’s game of war. debord is well-known as the head of the 60’s situationists international movement but what is apparently less well-known is that following the revolution in 1968 he left paris with his partner alice becker-ho for the tiny french village of champot where they lived until, after a prolonged spell of alcoholism and depression, he shot himself in 1994. between the years of 1968 and 1977 he worked on and perfectly his kriegspiel and claimed that, despite the great fame of his signature text society of the spectacle and of the situationist movement in general, the game of war was his only worthwhile endeavour.

so much for the moving intro, how about the game and the evening itself?

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earlier i was thinking about the way i draw. in order to find the position of the next point in the drawing i compare whatever part of the object i’m currently looking at along a horizontal x-axis and a vertical y-axis to other nearby visual anchor points to be as sure as i can that the drawing is accurate. i put a mental grid over the scene.

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whenever i had five minutes to spare these past few months, i was making time to dig into my copy of spiro kostof’s “history of architecture”, trying to get a handle on how right angles and straight lines first appeared in our midst. strangely - or perhaps not strangely - the origins of this very important aspect of our joint culture is at worst just ignored and at best quickly glossed over. what we know as architecture today stems from egyptian roots. kostof talks of the “temperate, steady” backbone of the nile from which “egypt’s early mastery of geometry and its affinity for the right angle” springs.

and that’s it! from there we move right along. in the preceding chapters, when kostof introduces us to earlier, european neolithic sites such as the wooden housing found at sittard in the present-day netherlands - a site which clearly arranges itself along rectilinear lines -, this crucial aspect of the design of said housing goes uncommented upon.

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so i’ve been very busy for months now. the client i’ve been working for has, sleeping aside, soaked up all my time. i’ve been working with interactive media arts group blast theory on a piece called rider spoke for the barbican. it’s been thrilling, stressful, fun, hell and lots more besides. mostly though it’s been time-consuming and energy-sapping. it is, however, done now and the public are currently out on their bikes riding around london enjoying the piece so i’m able to return here and get on with my own artwork again.

it’s nice to be back! :)