Related to Games

“That little game that men have always played with one another.” —Marcel Duchamp, answering the question, “What is art?”

Duchamp, a Dada artist, once took a hiatus from art to pursue a career as a professional chess player, a move that reflected not only his interests, but also his conviction of how art is made: a combination of chance and strategy while outwitting your opponent one move at a time. From the Surrealists’ “exquisite corpse”—in which participants added to a composition in sequence, not knowing what others had drawn—to artist collective JODI’s hacked and reconfigured versions of popular video games, many artworks embrace the unexpected product that can result from infinite play within finite parameters. Such works take their inspiration from the structure and rules of games, drawing on everything from children’s, card, and board games, to games of logic and strategy, to computer and video games.