– Maurice de Saxe, Reveries on the Art of War
ACTIVE SERVICE
Richard Barbrook
Since 1980s, Richard has been writing and teaching about participatory media, communist politics and ludic subversion. In 1995, he and Andy Cameron produced their pioneering critique of dotcom capitalism: The Californian Ideology. The Media Ecology Association awarded its 2008 Marshall McLuhan prize for outstanding book in the field of media ecology to his analysis of the Net’s origins: Imaginary Futures: from thinking machines to the global village. Richard is a trustee of Cybersalon – a London-based digital futures think-tank.
Fabian Tompsett
Fabian Tompsett overcame the shortcomings of a bourgeois education by gaining a proletarian education through the London Workers Group. From 1983 to 19855, he was involved with an anarcho-communinist tabloid newspaper: Class War. During the 1990s, Fabian and Stewart Home revived the London Psychogeographical Association. His participation in Class Wargames is a culmination of his interaction with Situationism from a proletarian class perspective.
Ilze Black
Ilze Black is a media artist and producer. She has curated numerous media productions, art events and happenings in and around London since the early-2000s. She is one of the co-founders of the innovative new media arts collectives AmbientTV and Take2030. In 1990s post-Soviet Latvia, Ilze co-founded the seminal art initiative art bureau OPEN. Her projects focus on network populism, free wireless, open communities and transnational society. For five years, Ilze led Waterman’s new media art programme and was also an associate of NodeL and HiveNetworks. She was the director of Class Wargames Presents Guy Debord’s The Game of War.
James Moulding
James Moulding is a network thinker, political campaigner, and game designer who currently runs the UK Democracy Network and serves as a Lecturer in Network Development at Newspeak House. His career spans technology and activism, including co-founding air quality non-profit AirPublic, creating the viral 2017 app game CorbynRun, and co-founding Games for the Many, a Labour Party-affiliated game studio. He has also co-founded Campaign Lab and Common Knowledge, and served as National Coordinator of Extinction Rebellion.
Simon Youel
Simon Youel is head of policy and advocacy at think tank Positive Money, a visiting research fellow at the University of Manchester’s Law & Technology Initiative, and an aspiring cybernetic communist.
Richard Parry
Richard was a young anarchist who, true to his principles, did not become a member of any political group, until having reached a decent age, he joined Class Wargames. His work involves gaming legal situations as a criminal defence lawyer, and uncovering police wrongdoing within the confines of the Undercover Policing Inquiry. He is also author of The Bonnot Gang, an infamous tale of anarcho-banditry in ‘Belle Epoque’ France. Now fully signed up to cybernetic communist perspectives, he is a regular Class Wargamer.
Dave Levy
Dave Levy is an IT worker with certifications in cybersecurity and privacy, blogs at davelevy.info, is a member of the Open Rights Group and has worked on the digital rights agenda since 2010. He has been professionally involved in the gamification of IT training and plays with Class Wargames because it’s fun.
HONOURED VETERANS
Alex Veness
Alex Veness is a London-based artist who exhibits nationally and globally, and has works in a number of private and corporate collections. Essentially a painter, Alex’s work includes a range of other media, most notably his 2007 customised camera Xenon-Eye with which he documented the early years of Class Wargames. He teaches on the BA (Hons) Painting at Wimbledon College of Arts.
Rod Dickinson
Rod Dickinson is an artist and lecturer whose work explores ideas of belief, behaviour and social control. He uses software, programming and emerging technology to explore how they act as a form of control and how we interact with them, often unconsciously performing prescribed roles. His artworks have utilised methods of reconstruction, and restaging, focusing on historical moments, objects or events that have instructive parallels with the present. Rod is also Senior Lecturer in Digital Media, at the University of West England in Bristol and co-founder of the Bristol based digital art festival Control Shift.
Mark Copplestone
Mark Copplestone was a student of Russian & Soviet Studies at Lancaster University in 1973-7. After training at Goldsmiths College, he worked as a primary school teacher. Deciding that the classroom wasn’t for him, Mark in 1987 turned his hobby into a career when he was employed as a figurine sculptor at Games Workshop. After working for a number of other manufacturers, Mark set up his own company – Copplestone Castings – in 2000. Over the past twenty years, he has created 1,000s of different figures and has acquired an international reputation for his distinctive designs.
Lucy Blake
Lucy Blake is a software developer, founder member of Class Wargames and designed its first website.
Stefan Lutschinger
Stefan Lutschinger is a London-based philosopher, game designer, lecturer and conceptual artist.In 2008 Stefan participated in Cyland Multimedia Lab’s artist-in-residence programme in Kronstadt, Russia and was responsible for Class Wargames’ participation in the Cyberfest ’08 exhibition at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Stefan teaches Digital Media and Communications at Middlesex University.
FALLEN HERO
Elena Vorontsova
With background in journalism and radio production in both Leningrad and London, Elena was responsible for translating and dubbing the Russian version of Class Wargames Presents Guy Debord’s The Game of War film. Class Wargames salutes our much missed fallen comrade who died after a short illness in 2012. Ilze Black made ELENA – In Memoriam to honour her contributions to Class Wargames.