Introduction


The theme to this years exploration of 3sf at the biennale is Superposition/Superimposition. It is a very appropriate way of looking at three sided football for it requires us to look at 3sf not only as a game played by kicking a ball around a field – or a forest if you live in Lithuania – but as a game within the context of culture.

Three sided football has now been with us for 50 years – of which it is only the last 20 that have witnessed its experimental realisation. In true cybernetic fashion, the more it has been explored, the more the feedback from each game has allowed its arena of operation to expand.

Most of you probably know that three sided football was developed by Asger Jorn in 1962 - ostensibly as a metaphor for explaining how his theory of triolectics could be understood in a real world situation. In reality - three sided football was actually a deceptively simple way of conveying the complexities of his entire life’s work. My presentation at the conference on three sided football at least years World Cup in Silkeborg examined in detail the means by which 3sf managed to encapsulate Jorns thought - and I don’t propose to repeat it right now – but if anyone is interested I have it with me and would be delighted to present this again later in the biennale.

When it was picked up Fabian Tompsett in 1994 and the first game was actually PLAYED, three sided football was seen simply as a means of vitalising tedious debates on Anarchism into dynamic lived experiences. Today Three sided football is being played on an increasing basis around the world – with new and exiting possibilities for its understanding emerging at a startling rate.

So what I want to do today is to look at how three sided football operates as a multi layered transformative cultural morphology – shape shifting like a viscous flow through every arena into which it has been introduced. Like a hydra – three sided football has started growing exponentially with every iteration – each of which superimposes itself onto the original conception, enriching, complexifying, and diversifying. With the sum of every part being greater than the whole – the expansion and diversification of three sided football is starting to be understood as the means of its true expression.

So let us take a look at the various ways of understaning three sided that I know about – and after I have finished maybe you can help expand this collection with your own.



1.      testing out asger jorns hypotheis –

was it correct. Would playing 3sf be defensive and boring but ultimately lead to an explosion. Would the onset of the explosion result in a few hightened moments of spontaneous exaltation. From wnla in the 90’s onwards there has been a history in the UK of putting into practise the various therories of the SI – as so little in the documantation about them shows what happens. Jorns theory of triolectics is a notable example. Did Jorn mean this to be LIVED – was it really a set of suggestions for behaviour or an analysis of societal cureents.


2. Constructed situation

Because of the nature of this event – I probably don’t have to say too much about the Situationist project. But for those who are unfamiliar with SI ideas – here is very short intro. Essential to situationist theory is the concept of the spectacle, a unified critique of advanced capitalism of which a primary concern is the progressively increasing tendency towards the expression and mediation of social relations through objects.Situationists believe that the shift from individual expression through directly lived experiences, or the first-hand fulfillment of authentic desires, to individual expression by proxy through the exchange or consumption of commodities, or passive second-hand alienation, inflicts significant and far-reaching damage to the quality of human life for both individuals and society.A central concept of situationist theory is how this objectified alienation can be counteracted – and the principal means imagined is via the construction of situations, moments of life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening and pursuing authentic desires, experiencing the feeling of life and adventure, and the liberation of everyday life.

For many players who approach 3sf through the filter of the SI a common reason is a belief that participation in the game involves the realisation of the Constructed Situataion - whether this be the localised play of the one off game – or in the production of a larger body of “work’ which then constitutes a more involved and complex evolution of the Constructed Situation. Like those who see 3sf as a testing of Jorns theory of triolectics - those focused more on the constructed situation also see their activities as a lived development of situationist praxis.

Read more ALYTUS PSYCHIC STRIKE BIENNIAL: DIFFERENT 3SF FORMS

THE WORLD WE LIVE IN, and beginning with its material décor, is discovered to be narrower by the day. It stifles us. We yield profoundly to its influence; we react to it according to our instincts instead of according to our aspirations. In a word, this world governs our way of being, and it grinds us down. It is only from its rearrangement, or more precisely its sundering, that any possibility of organising a superior way of life will emerge.

Modern society is a society of cops (destructive workers). We are revolutionaries because the police (destructive workers) are the supreme force of this society. We are not for another society because the police (destructive workers) are the supreme force of all societies. We are not nihilists because we do not grant power to anyone.

We are Lettrists (حروفية‎ psychic workers) for want of something better….

the dérive (psychic workers union) has its limits... It’s a miracle it didn’t kill us. Iron infected our blood.

I

Psychogeography (reproductive work or labour) cannot be abstracted; it must be concrete. The very word psychogeography, (reproductive work or labour), suggested by an illiterate Kabyle to designate the general phenomena with which a few of us were preoccupied around the summer of 1953 (which all of us are preoccupied with throughout all time), is relatively defensible even in times of unrest. ( is most obviously so in all times of confrontation with the destructive workers.)  It does not stray from the materialist perspective.

II

Police repression and curfew (destructive workers) draw our eyes towards the ways in which the geographic milieu conditions a situation (psychic work) differently for each of its players and has never acted equally upon the affective comportment of all individuals. Our striving to attain the highest degree of consciousness of the elements that determine a situation (psychic work) demands a full examination of the implications.

III

While race and nationality are cultural – political – constructs, our psychogeographical (reproductive work or labour) experiments have shown that they materially condition (reproductive work) our experience of power and the city, the zones of our residence, our work, our play, our movements, even our ability to fully carry out intellectual inquiry (psychic work).
Read more THESIS ON PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY (REPRODUCTIVE WORK OR LABOUR)

Part 1: Alytus, Lughnassadh, 2015 (Report written in anticipation of release for the Winter Solstice, since culture is what is left when all that has been understood is forgotten)

In the summer of 2015 CE, somewhere in a forest in Southern Lithuania, just a few miles from the exact geographical centre-point of Europe, a contingent of psychic workers undertook the construction of a triangular “supercollider” from the ’pataposition of three overlapping orthographic projections of the Kabbalist “Cube of Space”. Here they launched three simultaneous games of three-sided football into each other at high speed, the intense energies released in this “super-superposition” being sufficient to open up higher dimensional space, uncovering the deep triolectics at play within the science of exceptions. In doing so, the assembled situlogists successfully glimpsed the quantum hyperspace of psychogeographic gameplay, completing the first phase in what has been called a “Great Unworking”: Three-sided football’s attempt at the psychogeographical “unbinding” of Europe.

Whilst it had long been decided that our bi -annual festive get-together would be marked by a communal game of three-sided football, initially some debate had taken place as to the exact format this might take. Blissett had, of course, within minutes of arriving, set out our own propositions on the matter to the assembled congress. Blissett and Blissett, as the instantly revocable delegates of the NXTPA, SOF and the Luther Blissett Deptford League, had in fact only arrived in the country the previous evening, having crossed the Konnigsberg bridges at 30,000ft the previous sunset. Still tired from our late night dérive through southern Vinius, a local minibus had spirited us through the sun -soaked pine forests to arrive just in time for coffee.

Blissett presented an informative paper on the 23 varieties of three -sided football, or at least those so far catalogued in the Book of Deptford, whilst Blissett’s report on Triolectical Football in N-Dimensional Space and Kabbalah Quantum Letterism was happily well received by the assembled psychic workers in the hall. In the paper we had suggested that a homeomorphic transformation of the Kabbalah’s Cube of Space - the inspiration for Isou’s Letterist cosmology - had been undertaken by John Dee in the 16th Century, through the use of non-Euclidean, n- dimensional geometry. Presenting the trifurcation of the Cube of Space into the Kabbalists’ Tree of Life (religion), the artists’ colour wheel (art) and the three-sided football field (sport), we demonstrated the hypothesis that through the use of super-superposition (what we opted to call ’pataposition), that it would be possible to experience three-sided football itself in n-dimensional space.

Ateh stated that he too had been considering the possibilities of superposition, whilst Ateh filled in the assembled delegates further upon his important research concerning hidden dimensions of Lettrism at the End of the Age of Divinity. This had, I gathered, been elaborated on at previous congresses, but it was useful for me to have a refresher on such crucial analyses. The afternoon saw us assembling for banner painting, ahead of the planned OPSINA (cOmmitee for the coordination of the psychic workers Plenary to Submit to reproductIve aNd productive workers And dominate destructive workers) psychic attack on the G4S offices at the Swedbank compound in Alytus. We were to carry out the action in solidarity with all those afflicted by its prisons, detention centres and concentrations camps worldwide. Using the collected local clay from the Situchemistry store in order to asemically embellish a number of translucent cloths.

This proletarian medicine was being dished out at morning exercises each daybreak to those willing and able to get up in time, but we noted that it also made an excellent painterly and plastic medium for the patterns and sigils with which we now adorned our garments.

The results, Blissett remarked, were quite satisfactory. Not only that, but I noted that it also reduced our dependence on industrially produced and dubiously sourced pigmentations, whose colonialist patronage is well known. Our newly -embellished drapes were then wrapped about our personages, whilst we transformed ourselves and each other by means of a Situpathic daubing ritual, singing and dancing whilst situlogically transmuting the very forms of our bodies through a transformative morphology of the unique.
Read more PRELIMINARY PROBLEMS IN CONSTRUCTING A TRIOLECTIC: Thoughts suggested following experiments in the...

Tae Ateh. I want to present our friend, I met with some years ago and that was only few years after I first time heard about him. To be precise – it was him who actually found me – and I am very thankful for that. His name is Ben Morea and most people know him because of his activities in 60-s. Alytus Biennial already hosted him 4 years ago in 2011. Then we talked about the past. Today we will try to focus on the present situation. Two years ago Ben proposed an issue of revolutionary animism. The combination of the words had immediate development in my own fantasy. He never told me what he actually kept in mind. I even didn’t ask. Instead I developed my own way of understanding how this concept works for me and the forum is specially arranged to somehow discuss it in a wider prospective then I am able to follow up myself - collectively. Now we have great opportunity to listen what the words mean to its originator. Moreover I am looking forward for a great discussion because here we have really diverse group of unspecialized persons – this is very much about what animism deals with – everybody is different, and we must learn how to deal with full respect to it.



Ben Morea. First of all I really want to apologise – I am not really comfortable in giving talks. I thought more about discuss. I want to give some slight introduction so we have some common ground. And then see what you think. What a term revolutionary animism is about? First of all this word revolutionary is overused … it is like a commercial word now. The revolutionary is a product wherever you look. And the only reason because I use it – even when I feel uncomfortable with it – is that the other word animism is a profound agent of understanding. And it can be entertained on its own. Person can approach animism just for itself… as spiritual life force of animism. But I personally see it as a vehicle for change…the vehicle to detect where to go in a future. For a beginning I will give a small introduction – in the 60-s I was very military activist. And it reached the point where in response to activism people started to be assassinated, eliminated. There were several attempts and I disappeared for 39 years. First 5 years I went to the mountains and lived on a horse back. And then I came out and home stayed completely out of a public domain. I never spoke to the people about my past or my ideas. And after 39 years somebody contacted me and asked me to come out to speak about the 60-s. I actually refused…I was really satisfied with what I was doing. I spent 39 years together with native people. And I was interested in understanding. Rather in the 60-s it was to radicalize and change the word as we new. We understood the political needs, the cultural needs, the artistic needs, the sexual needs, but we had a very little understanding of the spiritual needs. And I felt that was important. It was part of the picture, a puzzle. I fascinated with Native American culture. I felt there is something, a key that we were missing in a materialist Western culture… some understanding what is going to be necessary, but I couldn’t grasp it. And at the point that this physical need for my disappearance became necessary I decided it to be an opportunity to go to the mount native people and I satisfied that interest I had to understand were that missing piece spirt in. And through all 39 years I just get a beginning of understanding. The native people always say that it is a life time education… a life time experience. I don’t feel that after 39 years I understood enough to come back to try, but I understood enough at least to enter into a dialogue to the people about that missing link. Because my feeling was that materialist world which is dominant today and we lack of respect and understanding for the planet itself, that creative forces itself will bring us down. I felt I can use as a metaphor a coin, a materialist coin: the one side is obviously the capitalism, while on the other Marxist communism. They actually both are materialist. I doubt we can survive on a materialist basis. We have to understand we are a part of a larger edifice which is based not on the materialist law.
Read more Alytus Biennial 2015: Discussion with Ben Morea on Revolutionary Animism