zugswang a) and b)

In Fall 2021, I pursued an Independent Study with my friend Mekhi Gladden (Oboe, ‘22) and Dr. Thomas Patteson that investigated the fault lines between media, technology, and aesthetics. The final result of this study was a pair of pieces, zugswang a) and zugswang b).

A zugswang (stylized as the American spelling) is a situation in chess in which a player is forced to make a move despite no strategy existing that could prove beneficial. It’s total gridlock, a standoff.

I recently came across a necklace from a company that hires local artisans from countries experiencing civil war to recycle bullet casings and bombshells and make them into jewelry. It struck me what an apt metaphor this was for this piece.

If the mediation, virtualization, and pop culture iconography and narratives to which we are subjected on a daily basis is a form of violence or physiological harm, then this piece is about directly making the apparati of such violence into art.

zugswang a) centers around this idea of violence in the feedback loops produced by our hypermediated and pop-saturated society; and zugswang b) focuses more on the total deconstruction of language to its subatomic particles and the dissolution of the world into images (text by myself and Marshall McCluhan).