The essence or core of surrealism is the transmutation of the dream world into a tangible object of artwork instantiating its character in the material universe of objective experience. This process of drawing on the powers of the subconscious and physically sculpting such perceptions is precisely the origin of Checkmate. Throughout my life I have used this key behind creative divination with two other works: one, a play, The Outside, and the other, Television Is Watching You, my anti-utopian Orwellian video announcing the supremacy of the media over the individual. Thus, Checkmate began as a dream. In this dream, I entered a dark, labyrinthine netherworld surrounding five chess boards. The first chess board represented masturbation or solipsism. The second chess board was the foundation of the ego casting its gaze upon the lowly human race. Within the realm of the third board, I saw the summation of the dialectic created from man and woman. The fourth chess board symbolized time itself, echoing the ticking of seconds across the chamber surrounding it. Finally, the fifth board evolved from a two-dimensional, white/black matrix into the chaos of color which rearranged itself into a sentient, techno-organic life form supremely powerful, bending my will to its psycho-magnetic commands.

           This dream connected me back to my own sublimated urge to view this world and life itself as a reduction to white and black squares. After I had finished making Television Is Watching You I fell into a creative void, a void artists often experience after losing their own life force to the finished product. Upon awakening I realized exactly what my next focal point had to be. Chess had been something I became fanatical over since I learned how to play the game on my fifth birthday. I had met the first major love of my life over a chess game and had renounced the game after winning the state championship. I had always loved the motif of the evil comic book villain leering over, planning his attack on humanity. Over the years, I had created chess sketches expressing the megalomania of the mastermind who creates the unspoken strategies of the little people hopelessly bound to the board through metaphysical nonsense, routine, and social conformity. Now, this dream, a dream I can remember as though it occurred yesterday, dug its claws into my creative psyche, extending its arachnid-like tentacles into my will.

         The primary character I chose for myself to sink or fall into would once and for all be the summation of Chaplin/Sellers fixation I had been experiencing throughout the bulk of my theatrical life. Ten years earlier I had purchased a one-of-a-kind pair of sunglasses which when placed on my head allowed me to lose a certain human aspect of being and replace it with a darker, more nihilistic, sinister self, perhaps a self more connected to otherworldly or electronic consciousness. This character, "the chess master" is a type of representative or emissary for the brave new world which would supplant the current status quo of the human culture. He is a "front man" for a world of order destined to replace antiquated notions of human choice and freedom with a grim, apocalyptic substitute for all bravado implicit in human historical glory. I wanted to impart the eventual cataclysmic demise of the human race with the simplest of audio sound bytes. After experimenting with a number of monologue variations, the chessmaster, condescendingly seated in a crooked, Dr. Strangelove-esque manner, lets the naive viewer of this piece know two essential facts. "Little human beings, so easy to manipulate, so much fun to control!" opens what would emerge as the psychosexual dream world separating the beginning from the end, an end which is merely a prelude to the destruction of human society as we know it. This finale, which is itself more of an introduction than the unsuspecting receptacle of this transmission realizes, is concluded with the second primary sound byte punctuating Checkmate. "It makes me so excited to know so many of you are going to die."

         The greatest artworks which use time to indulge the observer are the ones which serve merely to introduce a sensation of foreboding terror following the digestion of the work. The introduction of tragedy, the assumption that evil somehow defeats the principles of good, forces consciousness to take a step back from what it is watching, becoming self reflective regarding assumed dramatic principles implicit in a happy ending. There is no happy ending in Checkmate, and in fact, Checkmate is meant to be a cinematic cartoon before a very real movie of global collapse and destruction of the human race. Yes, time is running out for mankind, time represented by the ticking we hear as my hands move the pieces on the board at the beginning and end of the performance. The last moves of the game I played with myself in the studio become the bookends for this tragic-comedy, and as the final move of the chess game is made, a move of defeat and concession, time has run out for the real game the human race has been playing with itself.

          The central, silent segment, the battle between man and woman, is sandwiched between cuts of the chess master watching Television Is Watching You. At first, I show myself hypnotized by the electronic god represented by the mutated, fifth board of my dream. After the erotic climax reaches its visual zenith, I return to that position, but replace my own effects from Television Is Watching You with maniacal channel surfing which has become a staple in the consumptive diets of most human beings. In addition to the media message demarcating the central drama, I open the piece with the visual axioms of style the viewer is about to watch. After fading up from black, I display the dress code of Checkmate, announcing of heralding a new fashion statement as well as a philosophy. Upon concluding the montage defining my attire, we see an ultimate moment of vanity as the chess master watches his own image, in isolation, on the television set. This apparent act of vanity is marred by a cryptic warning reflected back as the seated villain. "You cannot escape the crimes you have committed."

          What are these crimes? Are they perhaps the chess game between man and woman gone sour, transformed into an act of sexual perversity? The psycho-sexual dynamic which begins with a very proper game between my character and my partner, a sultry brunette who embodies style and subtle control, ends on a note of sadism, though peppered with flashes of phantasmagoric romance. Are these two characters acting out a nightly ritual, typical of their phenotypes, or is this a magic spell designed to set in motion the prophecy at the end of the piece? Or is the crime of utter vanity itself the infinite regress embodies by the television becoming a mirror for an individual whose soul has been replaced by a vapid void of self? Clearly the game segment summarizes the notions of restrained romance, typical of silent classics and the French cinema. However, as the first movement of Mahler reaches its crescendo, it is obvious this cute flirtation at a chess board has devolved into a German Expressionist, Frankenstinian laboratory of deranged, clinical experimentation, using pieces from the game as instruments of orgasm.

          Throughout the process of conjuring my dream into a cinematic product of lust and nightmare, the obstacles aimed at its contemplation grew in magnitude and severity, almost forcing me to abandon the project to oblivion. At one moment, for example, some of the raw footage became hopelessly entangled in a bulky, recording unit, and I was forced to carry this monstrous piece of equipment up and down a variety of staircases until I found someone to dislodge the precious material. At another time, I nearly went mad looking for the right piece of music essential for the silent sequence. It was only when I discovered that the first movement of Mahler precisely fit this segment to the frame, its crescendo precisely matching the crescendo of the visual action, that I decided to push forward. Of course, creating all the raw components which reflected to zones or realms of my dream paled to insignificance before the massive quagmire I had to reduce to clarity through a cognitively geometric editing process. At moments when I concluded I had a made a bigger stone than I could lift, an insight involving the momentary conundrum would erase an otherwise doomed project.

          Now, after enduring the hardships necessary for this process to reach its fruition, Checkmate exists as an independent entity in the material world, separate from my cognitive apparatus or even artistic will. The act of giving birth to a structure outside the experience of the body, of drawing on the recesses of the subconscious to form its embryonic essence, is the single most important aspect of the process inherent in its material instantiation. After all, I could have awakened from my original dream and cast its memory into the dumpster of phenomenological meaninglessness. Instead, I chose for the third major time in my life to investigate the mysteries linking the realm of imagination or the dream world to the domain of robust reality. By choosing to submerge my energy into the ladder of temporal formation, I have gained a deeper insight into the paradoxes implicit in existence and non-existence. Now that I am free of the devotional shackles of completion, I can objectively observe Checkmate as a structure separate from the psyche of its creator.

-Damon Zex