Olaf Unverzart - Touch, Move

In his exhibition "touch, move" Olaf Unverzart shows photographs, drawings and collages that are all concerned with the game of chess.

The photographer and artist has chosen the six-game match between grandmaster Garry Kasparov and the at the time most advanced chess computer Deep Blue as the focal point of his presentation. The 1997 match revolutionised the world of chess, because machines had until that point been considered too predictable to beat a grandmaster. Man vs machine was the claim of the match and besides it indications for the sport, it had a larger social resonance. The result of the match sparked new debates in how far the game as such can be perfected by pure mathematical calculation. During the match there were accusations and inconsistencies on both sides. IBM, who had manufactured the computer, dismantled the machine after the match.Unverzart attempts to make the match more accessible through his visualisation. His pictures intentionally remain on the level of secrecy, yet he infuses them, quite similar to an actual game of chess, with stochastic processes and calculations. Touch-move is a rule in chess that specifies that a player must move the piece on the board he has first touched.

Olaf Unverzart, born 1972, lives and works in Munich.Besides numerous exhibitions in Germany and abroad he ran a weekly photo column for ZeitMagazin in 2009 which earned him the 2010 Lead Award. In 2011 he held a scholarship at the Goethe Institut in Vilnius. Unverzart considers his books as a part of his artistic work. His most recent book "Don’t fade to grey" was published in 2011 by Verlag für moderne Kunst, Nuremberg. Following a tenure as a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg he currently teaches photography at the Mozarteum in Salzburg.