Nō Go

It is because of a friend staying in Japan and watching a Nō-play that I got the idea of a Nō Go, that is: of a game of Go played on a Nō stage within a Nō play; that is: of one, if not the oldest strategy game being played in one, if not the oldest major theatre form; that is: of one heavily formalized rule-set integrated into a different heavily formalized rule-set, the latter virtually forbidding the very notion of such an integration (it would be a no-go).

It would be two constellations of anonymity woven into each other: the masks and supra-individual tradition of Nō, and the blank, mutable diskness of Go pieces. Further, in this double constellation, two concomitant virtualities would meet and weave themselves into what is now a double helix of contingency planes: Go, which, according to the famous passage in A Thousand Plateaus, "proceeds altogether differently, territorializing or deterritorializing [space] (make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere...). Another justice, another movement, another space-time", folded into Nō spaciality marked by yūgen – the trembling and tranquil suggestion of "the common world found at the depth of sensibility which could only be described with such words as 'somehow' or 'somewhere'" (to take up Junzō Karaki's description).

And, of course, it would mean the integration of the place- and timeless playability of Go, its more than pan-Asian, rather pan-Global success – its "going elsewhere" – into the rigorous Japan-ness of Nō – its "staying same".

It would mean something that is one of human culture's best approximations of literal ghosts playing one of human culture's best approximations of 'pure strategy'.

Maybe, it would be like watching time playing space.

So what else than to let an artificial intelligence illustrate the notion? Would that not be, in some strange way, letting AI depict itself – an impossible double helix of rulesets, of virtualities, of anonymities, of masks, of grids, of disks, of playability and abstract ruleset, of suggestion and realization, of undeath and unlife?

I will say that I am extraordinarily happy with the results.

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