Rethinking Wargames is an ongoing participatory net art project that calls upon 'pawns to join forces to defend world peace', using the game of chess to find strategies that challenge existing power structures and their concomitant war machineries.

In early 2003 global street protests to stop the war against Iraq were attracting unprecedented popular support. In February I joined over a million protesters in the extraordinary march through the streets of London. People came together, across social and racial divides to express their dissatisfaction and disagreement with national leaders. Their banners read: 'No to the Bosses War', 'Individuals against War in Iraq', 'The Little People say NO to War', 'Listen to the People'.

I first posted a simple image of the chessboard reconfigured, with all the pawns united, to the Internet in early February 2003. I also posted to global chess forums and net art lists with the question, 'under what conditions could the pawns in this game win?'. The worldwide street protests provided a clear context for Rethinking Wargames.

This website documents and illustrates the irritated responses of chess pundits alongside more philosophical, political and humorous replies from artists, activists and blue-sky-thinkers.The idea of this project is to engage the attention and consideration of people, who, through chess, understand and enjoy competition, strategising, using their intellects and winning.

A traditional game of chess suggests ways in which these drives and attributes can contribute to the eventual supremacy of one tribe or nation (as distinguished by colour) over another. It prescribes the binding roles and relationships between royalty, nobility, clergy, military and militia. The game as it stands, serves as a schematic for social, psychological and emotional structures; long established and mirrored in our major institutions. It sharpens the human mind to the complexities of a certain logic/tradition of exploiting other human beings, in order to be 'the winner'.

The first phase of this project could be described as a bedanken experiment, in a similar vein to Yoko Ono's feminine-subversive reworking of chess 'Play it by Trust' . However where her all white chess set leaves all but the first few moves to be played entirely in the players' minds, Rethinking Wargames works with the medium of the Internet to facilitate the feeding back of participants responses and so offers a real potential evolution of the rules of the game.

The net art commission, awarded in April 2003 facilitated and platformed the second phase of the project, the development of the new online multiplayer game, Activate:3 Player Chess. It also partially funded the mammoth job of programming the new online game, brilliantly accomplished by Adrian Eaton- programmer for Furtherfield.org.

The research for the development of new online chess is documented chronologically in the Pawns Unite blog and is categorised in themes (linked from the left hand column of this page).

In the newly created 3 Player Chess, pawns (played by a 3rd player) preserve peace by stopping any pieces from being captured. If the pawns succeed in blocking the aggression of the higher pieces, the checkerboard is progressively over-grown with grass and the black and white checks disappear in the undergrowth.

Activist art
Since its inception, participants' questions served up key considerations for the project, usefully informed by their own perspectives and experiences. Deborah Kelly from www.the-boat-people.com asked some very useful questions. As a member of an artist-activist organisation, dedicated to reversing cultural amnesia in Australia, to combat growing hostility to refugees and asylum seekers, she seemed worried about the grand aims of my project. Her questions touched on ongoing concerns under discussion among the community of digital/net artists concerning 'political' or 'activist' art. She asked-
'How does [Rethinking Wargames] intend to participate in the world? How might the creative thinking for world peace fostered by the project gain life beyond the virtual?'

I answered: Rethinking Wargames participates in the world by engaging peoples' attention and concern with an invitation to reinvent the rules. The Internet facilitates an international network of 'individuals' who can flow information and spark ideas between each other, in a way that is not prescribed by 'authorities'. The people that make up the Internet community are activated and changed by what sparks them. These changes inevitably go on to have an impact through their interactions in physical localities as well as in the virtual venues. The project also gains life beyond the virtual, by eliciting a less restrictive and destructive model of social engagement in peoples' minds and documenting their responses.

In an interview with Joel Bleifuss, the novelist, Kurt Vonnegut talked about his involvement with the 1960s protests against the Vietnam War.

' When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high.

And so it is with anti-war protests in the present day. Then as now, TV did not like anti-war protesters, nor any other sort of protesters, unless they rioted. Now, as then, on account of TV, the right of citizens to peaceably assemble, and petition their government for a redress of grievances, "ain't worth a pitcher of warm spit," as the saying goes.'

After I'd laughed my head off in recognition and sympathy for the absurd disappoint expressed in this statement, I wondered why I was unconvinced by his argument. It seemed to represent a misconception about how human actions take their effect in the world. Different kinds of people respond variously to different kinds of activism. Art doesn't work like a weapon- immediate, deadly and threatening, it can't cause immediate bodily harm to an opponent (though you'd never guess this by the way some of our media and arts institutions behave). It interacts and fiddles with peoples' consciousness and sub consciousness. It changes peoples' attitudes.

This project invites participants to exercise their collective and collaborative imaginations in tandem with their instinct to preserve human life and community. It gains life beyond the virtual in the same way that all art does, by the way in which it activates the people who participate with it.
Admittedly, as activism- this project may be a slow burner. Through this project, people with a talent for strategic thinking, contribute to the re-evaluation of a familiar, but often inhumane, constricting and anachronistic system of human institutions. They are invited to think outside the box for a change, to identify with the multitude of 'little people' who arguably have the most to gain from a sustained world peace.

What next?

The occasions where the new 3 player chess has been played in public with conventional chessboards have resulted in a riot of laughter and rabid competitiveness. So a series of worldwide street tournaments are planned, with the first in San Franscisco (with HostelProjects) in the Summer of 2004. Other plans include enlisting the committed interest of serious chess players and building an online tournament facility so that a new 3 Player Chess community is able to evolve and develop strategies for the new game.

Special thanks are owed to the following people without whom this project could not have got started: Marc Garrett, Furtherfield Team, Adrian Eaton, Carol Webb, Ivan Pope, Maf'J Alvarez, Charles Cameron and the Low-fi crew