ARTIST’S STATEMENT: On Sunday 23rd July 1972 in Iceland, Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer played game six of a twenty-one game World Championship chess match. Spassky, USSR, was the current World Champion, Fischer, USA, was the mercurial, erratic challenger. The Cold War was raging and the Soviet Union had dominated chess for as long as anyone could remember. A victory for either side in the overall match would be a political gain. The battle received realtime coverage across the world. In game six Fischer played white. Here are his 41 moves, each accompanied by a 32-syllable alliterative verse, a deepfake spokesperson, cultural ephemera, the voice of Jacques Derrida, and the sounds of Lee Harvey Oswald’s post-arrest news parade.
Game Six is about post-truth politics, illusion, attention and language. It was written and created during lockdown 2020, and originally manifested as a 128-minute live projection ‘event’ in Camden, London in September 2021, before being condensed into this single film for Edinburgh’s first poetry festival.
Game Six was written and imagined by poet Thomas Sharp, and created and art-directed by Thomas Sharp, Jim Sutherland, Rosey Trickett and Mario Epsley.
