Etan Ilfeld is a London-based entrepreneur and the founder of Tenderpixel gallery, Tenderbooks, Tenderflix, Repeater Books, and the owner and managing director of Watkins Books and the Mind Sports Olympiad. Ilfeld is the inventor of Diving Chess and the author of Beyond Contemporary Art, an image-driven contemporary art book, which spans disciplines ranging from science, design and architecture to new media, film-making and performance art. He is also the co-author of Duchamp versus Einstein, a science-fiction novelette.
Ilfeld is the owner of Watkins Books, London's oldest Mind Body Spirit bookshop. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Watkins' Mind Body Spirit magazine. In the February 2011 issue of Watkins' Mind Body Spirit magazine, Ilfeld launched the 100 Spiritual List, which ranks the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People in the world. The 100 Spiritual list continues to be published annually. In 2014, Watkins Media acquired Watkins Publishing, Nourish, and Angry Robot from Osprey Publishing. Ilfeld launched an additional imprint within Watkins Media called Repeater Books in 2016, which focuses on politics and philosophy.
Mind Sports
Ilfeld is a competitive strategy games player having won the WorldAmateur Poker Championship title at the Mind Sports Olympiad in 2010. Ilfeld is a US Chess Federation National Chess Master, and the inventor of Diving Chess, a chess variant played in a pool such that each player can think during their turn for as long as they can hold their breath underwater. He is currently the chief organizer of the Mind Sports Olympiad.
Media and Art
In 2007, Ilfeld founded Tenderpixel Gallery, a contemporary art gallery in central London. In 2008, Tenderpixel began hosting an annual experimental film competition known as Tenderflix. Ilfeld is also a digital artist and his New Kind of Cinema work was showcased at TEDxLondon in 2011, included in the Apparatjik iPhone magazine and archived in Rhizome's ArtBase. New Kind of Cinema was programmed in Mathematica and inspired by the usage of cellular automata after training with Stephen Wolfram in Pisa during the summer of 2009. Ilfeld was also an executive producer of the feature films Killer Pad, and Remainder an adaptation of Tom McCarthy's Remainder directed by Omer Fast. Ilfeld also produced the sci-fi graphic novel, Binary, based on Chris Hinz's award winning Liege-Killer novel. He has written extensively on contemporary art. His article Contemporary Art and Cybernetics was published in the peer-reviewed Leonardo Journal published by MIT Press in February 2012, and his book, Beyond Contemporary Art, was published in October 2012 by Vivays Publishing. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp's archived letters, Duchamp versus Einstein was co-authored with Christopher Hinz as a science fiction novelette featuring Duchamp and Einstein as they are manipulated by an alien visitor.
