64-Cylinder Engine #21

Chess is a game of choreography: both the external choreography of pieces moving across a board, and the internal choreography of the players themselves determining which moves to make. In this work, I explore the nexus of both of these movements.

I took a photograph of a chess board as the Pacific Ocean washed over it. Over this board, I have projected historic games of chess in textual form. Each square represents a narrative, of each piece as it moved, and various potential moves suggested by the Stockfish chess engine at every step in time.

Each edition of this gentk is a single game of chess, one of 82 possible historic games, either from the perspective of the white or the black side. The games span five and a half centuries, though most are from the 19th and 20th centuries due to availability of data. A variety of colors illustrate potential moves (and outcomes, predicted by the Stockfish engine) as well as the actual moves made, in turn.

I am providing 64 editions of this gentk: one for each square on the board. This work is fully responsive and will scale to any resolution, although due to the density of its text, I believe it looks best on a 4K (or higher) display. The code is vanilla JavaScript with zero dependencies.

Thank you for collecting. Please enjoy.