Triad Badminton court

Triad Badminton court

Triad Football pitch

In 1945, an Arsenal match against a Soviet football team called the Dynamos was organized in London with the naïve belief that it would warm up the frozen pre-cold war Anglo-Soviet relations.

In an article published at the time titled The Sporting Spirit,
George Orwell wrote about his disbelief when hearing “people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet on another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield”, and then add that “Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win (…) At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare (…) Serious sport
has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.”

My idea was to compare the binary tension between 2 (= 1 winner + 1 looser) and the tension existing between 3 elements, and to make that tension a triangle instead of a bi-polar line.
A court or a pitch designed for 3 entities also engages questions of alliances and strategies: would 2 players spontaneously team up in order to win over a stronger third one? And then inverse the alliance system as the score evolves? Would the tension remain as a triangle shape, or should we then talk about a V shaped relationship among the players (2 against 1)?

“to know (something) like the back of one’s hand”

1. (transitive, idiomatic) To be intimately knowledgable about something, especially a place.

Littéralement « connaître quelque chose comme le dos de sa main ».

Explanation: Do you recognize this intriguing globular cluster of stars? It’s actually the constellation of city lights surrounding London, England, planet Earth, as recorded with a digital camera from the International Space Station. Taken in February 2003, north is toward the top and slightly left in this nighttime view. The encircling “London Orbital” highway by-pass, the M25, is easiest to pick out south of the city. Even farther south are the lights of Gatwick airport and just inside the western (left hand) stretch of the Orbital is Heathrow. The darkened Thames river estuary fans out to the city’s east. In particular, two small “dark nebulae” – Hyde Park and Regents Park – stand out slightly west of the densely packed lights at the city’s core.

Jérôme took this picture in situ of a biro drawing on canvas I did a while ago. Looking at my friend Margot‘s amazing biro work brought it back to my mind.
After it had been forgotten laying somewhere against a wall it looks like it couldn’t find a better place.
It’s so Jérôme and it’s so me.

CMYK (short for cyan, magenta, yellow, black, is a subtractive color model, used in color printing.
In additive color models such as RGB, white is the “additive” combination of all primary colored lights, while black is the absence of light.
In the CMYK model, it is just the opposite: white is the natural color of the paper or other background, while black results from a full combination of colored inks.
I applied both the additive and the subtractive combinations by assembling a cyan picnic plate to a magenta and a yellow acetate files. Just to check. And it’s all TRUE!

I did this installation in London Fields on sunday, gathering colours more that the actual objects bearing them .
As he was helping me running after everything the wind was blowing away Jerome asked me to take a picture of his hand pointing at a tone like a color selector on Photoshop.
He used the shot to illustrate this article.