THE GAME OF WAR, lecture, short movie, exhibition, board game playing

April 22nd

19.00-21.00
Richard Barbrook (Class Wargames Collective), lecture

19.00-21.00
The Game of War, short movie

21.00-23.00
opening of the exhibition and board game playing in the Aksioma Project Space (Komenskega 18, Ljubljana)

Following the events of May 1968 Guy Debord – founding member of the Situationist International and author of The Society of the Spectacle – focused on inventing, refining and promoting the project: The Game of War (Le Jeu de la Guerre). The Game of War is a Napoleonic-era military strategy game 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. It is not just a game: it is a guide to how people should live their lives within Fordist society. By playing, revolutionary activists can learn how to fight and win against the oppressors of spectacular society.

In 2007 a multinational group of artists, activists and academics formed the group Class Wargames to investigate the political and strategic lessons that could be learnt from playing Debord’s 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. For group members playing wargames is not a diversion from politics: it is the training ground of tomorrow’s cybernetic communist insurgents.

In only one evening we present a lecture by Richard Barbrook, a member of the group Class Wargames and author of the book Californian Ideology, and a movie by Ilza Black The Game of War (inspired by Alice Becker-Ho and Guy Debord’s The Game of War), which 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, this film provides an insurrectionary manual for those struggling to build a truly human civilization. You are welcome to play the board game and visit the exhibition at the Project space Aksioma. Richard Barbrook will also give instructions in the beginning as in how to play the demanding strategic team game.