Readymade

Latest

  • Recreate Marcel Duchamp's lost chess set with your 3D printer

    by 
    Daniel Cooper
    Daniel Cooper
    07.10.2014

    Conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp was known for his "readymades," which declared everyday objects to be works of art -- most notably "Fountain," a public urinal on a pedestal. Duchamp was also something of a chess obsessive and created both an ornate tabletop set and a travel version, the latter of which he wanted to mass-produce. The first of the pair, however, was thought to have been lost to a private collector, so no-one would ever again be able to play with it at least, until now.

  • GDC: Networker's paradise, but beware

    by 
    Vladimir Cole
    Vladimir Cole
    03.26.2006

    One thing we like to do here at Joystiq is bring you some of the more offbeat information that concerns the culture of games, gamers, and the people who make them, so file this under the rubric of "offbeat" (careful not to transpose those syllables, because getting them right is important given the subject matter to come). I stationed myself in a very busy GDC restroom for approximately five minutes just after the lunch hour and counted the ratio of hand-washers to neanderthals who didn't wash their hands. This is just my first data point, and an incomplete one at that. Given the evil looks that that I got for standing there, I chose to curtail the survey. So: knowing that these numbers are based on a very small sample size, and knowing that a more robust statistical survey would be more desirable, I provide these numbers anyway. The ratio was 11 to 3 in favor of hand-washers. Not bad! Two of the fellows who skipped the hand-washing were the unkempt sort who probably don't wash much else, either. The third gent was wearing a suit. Guess he was just eager to get back to gladhanding. We'll conduct a 10-minute survey at E3 to see if the ratio's any different when the audience is more international and the so-called "unwashed masses" are present in greater quantities. [Image comes from Duchamp's Fountain ]