Irresponsible Mediums

In 1968, avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp and composer John Cage exhibited Reunion, a chess performance, in Toronto, Canada, where whenever a player moved a piece, it generated a musical note until the game was transformed into a symphony.

Inspired by this performance, Irresponsible Mediums--poet and academic Aaron Tucker’s second full-length collection of poems—translates Duchamp’s chess games into poems using the ChessBard (an app co-created by Tucker and Jody Miller) and in the process, recreates Duchamp’s joyous approach to making art, while also generating startling computer-made poems that blend the analog and digital in strange and surprising combinations.

With an introduction by Jennifer Shahade, two time U.S. Women’s Chess Champion.

AUTHOR

Aaron Tucker

AARON TUCKER is the author of four books: Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp, and the poetry collection punchlines, as well as two scholarly texts, Virtual Weaponry: The Militarized Internet in Popular Cinema and Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema (both with Palgrave Macmillan). His current collaborative project, Loss Sets, translates poems into sculptures which are then 3D printed (http://aarontucker.ca/3-d-poems/); he is also the co-creator of The ChessBard, an app that transforms chess games into poems (http://chesspoetry.com). In addition, he is a professor in the English department at Ryerson University.