These essays are from the catalog of "The Rules of the Game | The Game of the Rules." They attempt to frame the constellation of game, software and political allegory that were at the center of that project. An edition of 100 copies of the catalog were printed and distributed at the Whitney ISP exhibition at Artist Space.
Experiments which aim to queer the rules of the game foreground the conventionality
of rules, the arbitrariness of rules, the relationship of agency to rule
making, the location of changing rule sets within the diachrony of
history, and the aesthetic nature of rules and rule making. They strive to
Rules connect the world of games to the province of computation; rules are
the mechanism of both domains. On the side of the machine, there is no fraught
social predicament where adherence to rule is subject to a contest of will:
computers follow rules as long as they are inscribed in the logic of the
machine. There is no place for will and no separation between the rule's
If life were a game, what game would it be? Certainly not the game of all
possible games. And not Magister Ludi 's Glass Bead Game: the aesthetic athletics
of the intellect.[1] It
must rather be either war or race; in either case, it is a contest.
The idea of a theory of games arises in the middle of the twentieth century.
What the science promised was a way to model and predict economic and political
behavior that was assumed to follow the rational choices of individual actors. Homo
economicus had a more or less adequate
The ideology of individualism requires the maintenance of some semblance of interpersonal difference. The horror produced by the idea of cloning, or the imagined forced conformity of communist society, is surely tied to a certain attachment to the idea of difference. At the same time, conformity exerts a strong influence and difference is disciplined away.
There is an unfortunate sense of naturalness in the use of the screen as the main output device for computational experiments. It is common to divide generative art from generative music, but there is no real necessity for the distinction; the underlying structures and code may be almost identical.
This game models the self-amending rule set that is the basis of the
American legal system. Suber, a logician, was interested in the
paradoxes that arise in a system where logical contradictions inside of
a self-amending rule set cannot be straightforwardly resolved. The
unequal distribution of the power to change the rule set, and the
Observe that even without a grid, the rooms you now inhabit are partitioned and assigned specific uses. How have these been determined and allotted? How is that one corner has become the territory of a certain artist, and one wall, the domain of another?
Ever since the enclosing of the commons, there seems to have been a tendency for all grouped uses of space to reenact that tragedy on a petty scale. We have unlearned swell the communal use of space, that it is practically inconceivable; its laws and its rights are lost. Space is received by a group as a whole and in common, but its use is understood as individual and exclusive.
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Colophon.