Pre-emptive reflections on pulse chess and bare life

Tomorrow, with luck, I shall receive my pulse readers, and will be able to start working out how my heartbeat mediated chess will work.

Following the lectures on biopolitics and aesthetics I've attended, I've been thinking a lot about the concept of bare life and how it relates to this project. In a sense, my working model of bare life is actually rooted in Wittgenstein, it is the infant's cry that is replaced by the expression of pain. In another, it is of course from Benjamin, the person reduced to bare life by the violence of law. I've not mapped out how this relates to the politics of the project.

So, by replacing the turn based game time with time governed by physiology, am I bringing bare life into the game of chess? This is tricky. Lewis Mumford recounts how clock time replaces physiological desire, I eat because it is 6pm, not because I am hungry. Is the swing of the turn like that of the pendulum, and is the heartbeat an expression of physiological regulation? I don't think it's so simple, the heartbeat is completely mediated by the pulse readers, and it isn't really the base unit that we would use without the turn system - it does not occupy the place of the infant's cry. But it is bringing the body into a cerebral game - like 'politeness' in Benjamin's Ibizan Sequence, it is opening up the boundaries of the conflict in the game. But the end it is doing this for is so unlike Benjamin's 'politeness', it creates the issue of conflict to be opened up - or at least that's the intention.