Rubic's Cube story

The text that follows is an abstract from the article that Saurabh Vaidya ,my close friend and fellow worker wrote for the introduction of our common offspring...

"... Our intention is to design an archive of these multiple possible variables that hang on a string that stretches between dreams and reality within one of the alley ways of our city and make a city making machine.Like Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, it shall embody within it numerous elemets in the form of Sites,Histories, Desires, Resistances etc. that form different imaginations of cities through these imaginations that we attept to make the observer conscious of the disjunction between the vast possibilities that are possible and existing sterile urban landscapes being churned under the capitalist mode of production.
Thus critiquing the existing systems of production of the urban space being the main objectives the tools of change, surprise and intrigue demonstrated by the Surealists like the exquisite corpse becomes an important entry point.But Guy Debord of the Situationist International critiqued the surrealists that mere chance cannot be a powerful enough tool to resist the strongly structured mechanisms of industrial society and its ability to control and engineer the urban environments.And so it became important for us to find a tool that shall allow a play of exquisite corpse but at the same time embody within it multiple fragments of structured arguments. The ability of games (like chess, card games, monopoly, backgammon, etc) to bring together multiple players with dialectical positions and create their own space trough the rules became an important aspect that had to be integrated within the object/tool that we desired to create.if one were to analyse different games in terms of their structure one realises that besides the physical differences and the logic or rules there is an important difference that determines the elaboration of the physical aspects.
For example, games that are strongly structures around rules assumed to be well accepted and understood by the players are more simpler in their physical make up like chess, cards etc but on the other hand games where the physical form of the games is an integrated part within the logic of the game has more subtle rules, with the manifested form hinting towards the objective of the game.Thus at this point of the time it was realised that tool/object should not be game with symbols but more of a device that generates numerous permutations and combinations of argumentt, rhetoric and dialectics with its physical form hinting towards the nature of engagement required on the part of the observer.

The Rubik's cube was a form that satisfied the above conditions and at the same time allowed us to design each fragment of the cube in the image of the argument [with each surface of the cube being an individual projection of the future in 2080 juxtaposed on the city of London].

Metaphorically the form of the Rubic's cube also allowed imagination of an object that rew parallels with multiple attempts through art history to present space.