As part of our War of Words exhibition, Proteus Gowanus has opened the War Games Room. Every Saturday or Sunday from 12-6, you can play war games with your friends and enemies in the back room at Proteus. You can play on a handmade Risk game, designed and painted by Ryan Jones with New York City boroughs, not nations, vying for the upper hand. Also featured will be a magnetized Diplomacy board assembled by Tom LaFarge, a beautiful hand-tooled game of Connect Four by Nick DeFriez, Scrabble, Battleship, cards and other games. $5/player.
Can you tell us who this man is?
The War Games Room is presided over by the portrait of an unknown military leader.
He looks quizzical, bemused, perhaps not so easy to outsmart in the game of war.
Can you help us identify this fancy fellow?
Last week, Jon Freeman, founder of the game room, The Brooklyn Strategist, gave a very interesting talk on Game Theory, war and the board games Risk and Diplomacy. This Saturday evening, David Bukszpan, author of Is That a Word? will talk about Scrabble, presenting scores of surprising words, offer tips and tricks, and share other highlights from his book to help word warriors from all skill levels. And on Sunday afternoon, Tom LaFarge will conduct a class on the World War I board game, Diplomacy, known to promote deception and tear apart families and friends, just like the real thing!
Posted by Tammy
on November 30, 2012. Category: Battle. Tagged: brooklyn strategist, david bukszpan, diplomacy, Is That a Word, jon freeman, Nick DeFriez, Risk, Ryan Jones, scrabble, tom lafarge, war games room •
Posted by Diane
on November 26, 2012. Category: Battle. Tagged: war of words •
Proteus Gowanus and our Projects-In-Residence Observatory, Morbid Anatomy Library, Reanimation Library and Hall of Gowanus, prepared for the worst before Hurricane Sandy and we are very happy to announce that our preparations were unnecessary. We feel very grateful that our floors and books and artifacts and shelves were not bathed in toxic sludge. The floodwaters around the Gowanus area barely penetrated our galleries, seeping slightly through our alley door but covering only a bit of the floor. We did, however, lose all power due to extensive flooding in the basement of our building, which is now filled with six feet of standing water and has extinguished the power indefinitely.
As a result, we must close our doors for the next two weeks, hoping to reopen on November 15 in time for that night’s Fixers Collective session at 7pm. This means that our Translation Workshop for the Monolingual this Friday is postponed, as is the opening of our War Games Room and the launching of our Battle Film Series. In addition, all Observatory and Morbid Anatomy events between now and mid-November are also cancelled unless you hear otherwise.
Posted by Tammy
on October 31, 2012. Category: Battle. Tagged: cancellations, floods, Hurricane Sandy •
Posted by Diane
on October 26, 2012. Category: Battle. Tagged: jenny holzer, proteus gowanus, redaction, war of words •
In the War of Words, removing a word can be as potent as adding one.
Consider Paula Gaetano Adi’s video documentation of her ongoing performance Pica (on view in War of Words). She calls the performance “an attempt to embody a non-native language.” In this case, the word embody is used quite literally. Each day she carefully removes a single English word from an Spanish/English dictionary, speaks the word and then eats it.
Taken at face value, there’s a peculiar deadpan humor at play. But beneath the surface Paula’s performance hints at a bit of prejudice.
¿Quieres algo de comer?
Read and view more by visiting Paula’s website
Posted by Diane
on October 22, 2012. Category: Battle. Tagged: Paula Gaetano Adi, proteus gowanus, redaction, war of words •
Redaction looms large in the War of Words.
Words are ingested, negated, excised, crossed out, sliced and melted.
It’s not as though we set out to do this, it just happened to work out that way. Interesting. Over the next few posts I’d like to explore this idea a bit by sharing with you some of the artists, works, artifacts and books in the exhibition.
Redaction 01
Detail of Cody Trepte’s “On Computable Numbers.” Shown are 6 of the 17 parts of the work.
Cody Trepte‘s piece “On Computable Numbers” takes its title from Alan Turing‘s seminal essay of the same name. Turing is a well-known historical (and tragic) figure who is often credited as the founder of computer science and artificial intelligence. Trepte’s piece is comprised of 33 pages of this essay in which he has very carefully cut out all of the words, leaving only 0’s and 1’s.
Cody writes, “By preserving only the binary code present in the text, I attempted to create a recursive artifact of Turing’s work: applying the very concepts Turing invented to the mathematician’s own writing.”
What none of this reveals is the beautiful emptiness that has emerged out of the grid of conceptual rigor.
Posted by Diane
on September 25, 2012. Category: Battle. Tagged: alan turing, cody trepte, proteus gowanus, redaction, war of words •
Posted by Diane
on September 17, 2012. Category: Battle. Tagged: proteus gowanus, war of words •
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Yes, we’re back!
Jenny Holzer figured high on the list while thinking about War of Words. I confess that I often utter the words “Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise” (most often while watching/ reading the news—but perfect for so many occasions).
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