OM NORMAL
I’m not really a good chess player, but I love playing games. I’d say I’m a player in the broad sense. Chess feels like a perfect game — I don’t even remember when I learned it, it was just always there. Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, when computers first entered my life, one of the earliest games I encountered was chess, and it became the ultimate challenge for machines — the holy grail of intelligent games. That moment arrived in 1997, when a computer finally defeated a human world champion, and from then on, playing chess against machines stopped being about winning. Today, instead of classic chess, I’m interested in how chess can be reimagined. For this installation, I selected several video games inspired by chess or playing with its logic in unconventional ways, alongside a set of custom chess pieces 3D-printed as objects anyone could make themselves, and experimental boards — including a 5×5 variant and a double-chess setup — all presented as a playful exploration of games, design, and thinking beyond the standard rules.
Șah
Florin Vasiliță
1988 V1.0 & V1.1
One of the earliest Romanian chess video games was released in 1988 and signed by Florin Vasiliță. The program was distributed on two cassette tapes by the jeco Collective (sub division of electrocord) and developed for the ZX Spectrum architecture, widely cloned in Romania at the time through local machines such as HC and Cobra. The game itself is not particularly difficult by today’s standards, but it is solid, structured, and offers multiple difficulty levels — a serious chess program meant to be played, not feared. What makes it especially interesting is that it is, quite openly, a complete rip-off of psion chess from 1982: the author did little more than translate the instructions from English into Romanian, while leaving the actual commands untouched. As a result, players are told to “select color,” with Black assigned to “B” and White to “W” — an obvious trace of its original source, and a small but telling artifact of early Eastern European game culture, where adaptation often mattered more than originality.
