Gavin Turk, "The Mechanical Turk" (2008)

The basement at Sebastian Guinness Gallery features the premiere of the newest “Art of Chess” commission, a film by Gavin Turk, in which the artist plays a life-size chess-playing automaton that toured Europe and America in the 18th and 19th centuries, often outwitting grandmasters, and, legend has it, Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin. The Mechanical Turk was eventually revealed to be a hoax, with a human being cunningly hidden inside the machine. Nowadays grandmasters can face a nearly opposite problem: human opponents cheating with the aid of a concealed machine (computer).

HD film on DVD. Duration: Approx. 20 minutes.

Courtesy Sebastian Guinness Gallery