After the May ‘68 Revolution, Guy Debord - the founder of the Situationist International and the author of The Society of the Spectacle (1967), a searing critique of the media-saturated society of consumer capitalism - devoted much of the rest of his life to inventing, refining and promoting what he came to regard as his most important project: The Game of War. The Game of War is a a Napoleonic-era military strategy boardgame where armies must maintain their communications structure to survive - and where victory is achieved by smashing your opponent's supply network rather than by taking their pieces. As such, it isn’t just a game: it is a guide to how people should live their lives within Fordist society. By playing, revolutionary activists could learn how to fight and win against the oppressors of spectacular society.
Intrigued by the importance Guy Debord placed on his invention of The Game of War, in 2007 a multinational group of artists, activists and academics formed Class Wargames to investigate the political and strategic lessons that could be learnt from playing his ludic experiment. Class Wargames is committed to exploring how Debord used the metaphor of the Napoleonic battlefield to propagate a Situationist analysis of modern society. Inspired by his example, its members have also hacked other military simulations: H.G. Wells’ Little Wars; Chris Peers’ Reds versus Reds and Richard Borg’s Commands & Colors. For the group’s members, playing wargames is not a diversion from politics: it is the training ground of tomorrow’s cybernetic communist insurgents.
Along the years, Class Wargames manifested itself through a series of public events - to all effects, performances - in which the group members play the Game of War in public, in such locations as the Hermitage Museum, the ICA Institute of Contemporary Arts or the Sculpture Hall of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

On show at Aksioma Project Space will be presented: a metal, sculptural version of the Game of War boardgame; the book Class Wargames: Ludic Subversion Against Spectacular Capitalism (2014); The Game of War film by Ilze Black, a 21st century treatise on revolutionary strategy in the cybernetic age that analyses the modern conditions of neo-liberal capitalism and the methods required to transcend it utilising both classical military theory and the political insights of Situationism; and seven prints from the Xenon-Eye series by visual artist Alex Veness. A Class Wargames co-founder, Alex Veness documented most of the group events since 2007 with an hybrid camera constructed by himself, combining a hacked digital scanner (to become a photographic plate) and a Victorian camera. Xenon-Eye’s lack of empathy, its predilection for representing humans as unnatural grotesques, can be understood as a parodic visual aesthetic for neoliberalism. As awareness grows of unchecked market’s indifference to human welfare, these images come to define the individual’s true identity within the presiding system’s logic: distorted, extruded and forced into unbearable forms. Far from showing people ‘as they really are’, Xenon-Eye shows them ‘as they really exist’: unwilling actors within the current socio-economic logic.

Artistic Director: Janez Janša
Producer: Marcela Okretič
Executive Producer: Sonja Grdina
Public Relations: Hana Ostan Ožbolt
Technician: Valter Udovičić
Documentation: Jernej Čuček Gerbec

Partners: Zavod Bunker, Center for Social Communication Research of the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana and Drugo More

The Game of War is realized in the framework of Masters & Servers, a joint project by Aksioma (SI), Drugo more (HR), AND (UK), Link Art Center (IT) and d-i-n-a / The Influencers (ES).



Supported by: the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana.



CONTACT
Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana