In Conversation: A. L. Bahta and Corrine Ciani

Ahead of their talk at FWB FEST this week, multidisciplinary artist and creative technologist A. L. Bahta connects with writer Corrine Ciani to discuss their joint venture Club Chess and the relationship between physical and online spaces

Toying with the fuzzy edges of physical and digital worlds, A. L. Bahta and Corrine Ciani meld their favourite corners of internet subculture into a novel take on partying with their conceptual social club, Club Chess.

Their crafts delve into utilising emerging technology to enhance human creativity and nourish real-world communities, and Club Chess represents an amalgamation of this approach with a distinct New York flavour. Through their union, they seek to resurge tactile experiences in a time of deep digital saturation and widespread disassociation.

Between them, their disciplines span music, art, writing, design and tech, with a shared taste profile at the core of their overlap. Both operating across the fields of AI and crypto, they recognise a serious deficiency of aesthetic power within emerging technology, and a missed opportunity for creativity to simplify and increase understanding of this realm.  

This week, the pair will deliver a talk at this year’s edition of FWB FEST – the annual music festival and emerging tech conference produced by Friends With Benefits (FWB) in Idyllwild, California, and a new cultural institution growing the adoption of emerging technology in pursuit of a better internet.

Ahead of the event, they contemplate the renaissance of chess culture and our need to translate our digital selves back into the real world. 

What drew you together as collaborators?

Corrine Ciani: I moved to New York in February of last year right after Alec started Club Chess, which at that time, was more of a chess club. That was one of the first parties I went to in New York when I officially moved here. 

A. L. Bahta: We had the same aesthetic agenda. When Corinne stepped into the picture, Club Chess was more like a party praxis, seeing what you could get away with within the space of what a party could be. Corrine understood some of the stuff I was playing with and was like, ‘You need to make it a great party and do it on a bigger level’. 

C: What drew me to Alec was that he felt like a proper artist. He was living in a way I found really interesting. Just the way he moved through the city, making sculptures and throwing this party, being good at chess – very multifaceted. I was intrigued.

How has living in New York City, and the physicality of the city itself, impacted your work?

C: It’s such a specific way of moving in the world. In LA, there’s time to daydream. You’re in your car for hours alone. In New York, there is so much energy around you and no time to stop. It’s constantly moving, so you feel like you have to do things. It’s a different way of working. I feel like I’m constantly chasing something, I just don’t know what it is yet.

A: I’ll have lived here for 11 years this year. It’s almost like the city acts as a form of mind control and you become subject to the momentum of the city. Corinne, I remember you saying you thought that the party couldn’t happen in LA.

C: Yeah, everything’s too far in LA. They wouldn’t want to drive there. 

A: There was a spontaneous nature to how it started and where I had the opportunity to do it. I almost thought it would be just me and my friends wearing suits in a bar playing chess, and then eventually they would be like, ‘Now you have to stop. No one wants this to happen’. But it snowballed. 

On the note of physicality, we’ve been talking a lot about how Covid changed everything. We’re still living in this post-Covid context. There’s this aspect of chess.com proliferating, and chess being experienced primarily through the avenue of a 2D digital interface. Our [FWB FEST] talk is called 3D Chess: The Metaphysics of Party Culture. 3D chess is adding physicality back to the game, where it’s tactile and you’re not being told if you’re winning in real-time. You might even make a wrong move and not even realise it. You’re experiencing this 3D reality in front of you. 

Why is the physical so essential right now?

C: I hate to mention Covid again, but we spent years on our phones absorbing the outdoors from within this piece of technology. And there’s definitely an overreaction to social media influencer culture in general. I think that’s why you see such a rise in social clubs – running clubs, dinner clubs, chess clubs. We’re trying to experience the outside world again. Years before Covid, people were using online platforms to share interests and translate their personalities into the digital realm. Now personalities are being extracted from online selves and put out into the real world. 

A: I also think there was a long decade of cultural homogenisation and the slow death of subcultures that happened before Covid. One example that we use in the talk is almost every fashion brand in the 2010s adopted that minimalist, Sans Serif sort of logo. I feel like that’s a metaphor for what life became in that era. The Uber-ification of everything, if you will. There’s a clear reaction to that now. Even brands like Burberry switched back to [a logo more reminiscent of] its heritage last year. There is this idea that we went too far in one direction, and it’s really important to experience the idea of decorative things, not just focusing on grind culture and productivity. This ‘spice of life’ kind of thing is coming back.

 

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What makes Club Chess a good medium for your art?

C: My first time playing chess was at a Club Chess event. I obviously saw the game through media, but I never knew how to play. So when I started going to these parties — perhaps as a distraction tactic – I dressed as how I envisioned chess players should dress. ‘I know what I’m doing’, sort of thing. The party itself is a stage to perform upon. I think that’s what makes a good party in general – giving people a stage where characters can gather and people can show off and be someone else if they want to for a couple of hours.

A: When you put a chessboard in a club or a party environment, it creates the space for anything to happen. It’s this icebreaker that breaks the third wall, where the medium completely dissipates and you don’t even know what you’re experiencing.

As important as the physical is, technology is prominent in both of your work. How do you utilise emerging technology and how is it shaping your creativity?

A: I actually work in the AI space, that’s my day job. I have a creative studio with my friend Kevin James Neal called YWGI. We use non-commercial tools to make AI videos and AI fashion content. AI is a very interesting thing right now. Even before it took off, nothing felt real – there was this hyperreal aspect to images. And now everything is less about whether something’s real, but if it’s important, or if you care about it. 

C: I work for a company called Zora, which is crypto social media. Creating and putting stuff on the internet is never going to end, that’s what we’re continuously going to do. I’m really intrigued by how creators can make money from it. I think it’s insane that we just constantly post ourselves and we have a whole identity that exists online, but we’re just not making money from it. Using crypto is an interesting way to see how much money you can make from digital assets. 

We talk a lot about tastes and aesthetics, and I think that is something that is lacking from both AI and crypto – and why both are so distrusted and cringe a lot of the time. You don’t have artists and writers and creative people working in that field or being taken care of within that realm. I think the more you open up both spaces to people with great taste and the more you simplify it, the better it is for everyone. We should be using this tool to see what’s possible. 

Coding and those sort of tech jobs were so desired a couple years ago and they were paid the most. It was like, ‘Why are you studying art? Get into tech’. I actually think that because of how advanced technology is going to become, or is already becoming, the most desired jobs – maybe this is wishful thinking – will be people with ‘soft skills’. People who are able to communicate very clearly and are good at relationships and creative thinking, being able to write something in a clear, cohesive way. Those will become very desired skills. 

How do you see technology being able to enhance communities like Club Chess?

A: A big part of our talk actually uses the idea of a computer to sum up a party culture and the space that party culture exists in. You can think of a club as hardware, the culture that comes out of this club as software. Then we talk about Club Chess as an operating system. The way that this space interacts with the people and creates the culture that comes out of it is what we’re interested in. 

C: There needs to be more focus on doing things outside and having real moments where people gather. There’s the interest of world-building, and I think you can use the internet to build out your brand and your world, not the other way round. A lot of people start online and have all of this immediate interest, and then they try to throw a party and no one cares because they didn’t do the work of actually talking to people in real life. It’s really important to blend both. 

Also, we want to talk about new tech. Internet money is a very crazy thing to engage with and creators have a really hard time finding financial backing for events, producing projects and doing what they want to do. You can use that side of it to fund specific projects and see what people are interested in. 

For those that can’t attend a physical event, say they’re living somewhere remote, what online communities would you recommend they connect with? And what can irl communities learn from these online spaces?

A: That’s a really good question. As contradictory as this is to some of the stuff we’ve said, if you’re in a space where all you have is the online to connect with the communities that you want to connect with, you have to understand who you are. [You have to understand] your identity and be genuine in what you want to follow, what you want to chase, and the rabbit holes you want to go down online. 

C: I completely agree with that. It’s really important to figure out who you are and what you like first, and you will find people who are like-minded. Watch everything, consume everything, know your references. I think that’s something TikTok has eradicated, in a way. We’ve placed everything into trends. You’re a person, you’re not something that can be moulded into this aesthetic box. It’s really important to know those who came before you and why you like what you like, instead of just being fed information very quickly and saying ‘This is my personality now’. Your personality shouldn’t be built upon trends. You are the person and you can add to it what you wish. 

A: And what can irl communities learn from the online? That’s a really interesting point. I was actually talking to Corrine about this before. Most chess clubs are based on chess clubs, where they want to be tournament-level or just focused on being really good. They don’t have these other cross-disciplinary agendas. For us, there’s chess, but then DJ culture is a huge aspect of it too. Curating the music and referencing these niche historical moments or fashion rabbit holes. The party is almost a manifestation of things we actually like from online. It’s like a reverse Pandora’s box of picking and choosing these vaguely online cultures from the internet and putting them into the irl, because how great would it be if we could all sit in person and talk about things we like instead of behind the screen?

 

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We’ve spoken about the importance of really understanding yourself, but what has surprised you about yourselves recently?

A: I’ve definitely learned that each mind is truly unique. I know we’re all very similar, but we all have very different skills. I didn’t realise how differently I was thinking about some things to a lot of my closest friends. 

What else can we expect from you at FEST?

C: We’ll be giving a talk that takes a look at chess culture and party culture, and we’ll dive into how club chess came to be in the first place. We analyse how partying mirrors society, and we’ll give a brief history on subcultures-turned-scenes, tracing the lineage of what interests us and what we’re trying to achieve with this event. Then we’ll also be throwing a Club Chess event on Saturday to play chess outdoors. I haven’t played chess before midnight but it’s a daytime event, so I’m excited to do that.

A:  A lot of interesting points from the talk we went over in this interview, which is cool. There’s some points that I’d want to expand on in the talk from this.

What are you doing for the rest of the day?

A: Running around last minute. We started this project, Totem 1, which looks like a little pawn that we’ve 3D printed, and then it has an NFC chip. If you have one, it’s sort of like the bonus features disc of Club Chess, where we’re going to start uploading blogs and stuff like that. I have to go pick those up and assemble them tonight before we leave tomorrow because we’re taking some to FEST.

A real merging of the physical and the digital.