The sport-media complex, in particular sports videogaming, is evolving towards a state of virtual sport. Some of the technologies enabling this evolution are improved processor chips and graphics accelerators, virtual reality and advances in haptics, and peer-to-peer networks. Future technologies may include genetic engineering, molecular computing and nootropics. It is the march of positivism, for positivist research pays in a capitalist system.

Every shred of empirical data that is collected means a more robust simulation, or what I am calling virtual sport. But there is a limit in spacetime as to how robust a virtual world may become. It is the essence of that which cannot be captured by numbers. It is art.

Art, then, is the postmodern response to sport.

Is it worth it for posthumans to keep high-performance athletes (ie. professional) around as information-producing, thoroughbred pets, much the same as we homo sapiens keep dogs? Would posthumans find them entertaining, loyal, and perhaps even cuddle up to them?

Or even more interesting, consider this: an information system needs to eat information in order to survive. If the posthuman evolution in fact comes via uploading all of human existence into supercomputers, would the athletes then be more akin to a source of nourishment? Are the athletes then the posthuman version of domesticated dairy cows that provide milk — or perhaps even food themselves, such as (very expensive) cattle?

Mmmm … what's for dinner tonight, FM: Jersey Nets or Kobe Beef?

the more they stay the same.

Well, I can definitely say that this was one of the most unique days I've had in some time. I spent the first part of the afternoon at the Edmonton Art Gallery viewing an exhibit I had planned to see for a while — The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture, which was curated by Bruce Grenville. After that, it was off to see the deciding game of the Canada West Mountain Division basketball finals, between the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary, where the Bears prevailed 83-82 in overtime.

There's overlap between the two events, honest. But I'll come back to that later.

As the show noted, "The Uncanny provides a unique opportunity to explore and address the long history and complex nature of the cyborg image in the 20th century imagination. It shows how the image of the cyborg has provided our culture with a visual metaphor for the anxiety that accompanied the growing presence of the machine in western culture."

And so I found it interesting that the first piece to greet me as I hit the top of the stairs leading to the main gallery was an old iron lung that had been used at the Vancouver Pearson Hospital for the past fifty years to help polio patients with their breathing. I was reminded of Radiohead — a band that has always had a dark relationship with technology — and their song from The Bends, "My Iron Lung".

That set the tone, and Grenville's anxiety confronted me for most of my tour through the exhibit. Personally poignant moments follow, which are laid out in approximately chronological order (as was the exhibit):

Henri Maillardet, Automaton, 1810: This was a documentary video showing the operation of the automaton that Maillardet had created. According to the story, it had been taken apart, lost to its original owners, and eventually dropped off on the doorstep of a gallery, where nobody knew its purpose or origin. Eventually it was put together, cranked up, and the automaton wrote a poem that ended with the writing of the artist's name; in essence, the automaton came to life to tell its own story. Cool … and creepy.

Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion (Plates 46, 84, & 109), 1887: Muybridge was a photographer best known for his studies of human movement, which can best be described as an artist's interpretation/analysis of biomechanics. It reminded me of The Wormhole Laboratory.

Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times, 1936: Everyone has seen the clip of Chaplin riding through the gears of the machine, but I had never really known much else about this movie. Despite the dark message that Chaplin intended for his audience, this was a genuinely funny movie. It reminded me of a quote I once read from George Bernard Shaw: "If you tell people the truth, make them laugh or they'll kill you."

Survival Research Laboratories, clips from Virtues of Negative Fascination, 1979-82, and 7 Machine Performances, 1985-86: I was transfixed by this work the first time I strolled through the exhibit, and returned twice more during my stay. Survival Research Laboratories creates elaborate performance pieces where machines battle and otherwise interact in extremely violent fashion. Think Junkyard Wars meets Robot Wars, since SRL's work is basically the precursor to both shows.

Survival Research Laboratories was conceived of and founded by Mark Pauline in November 1978. Since its inception SRL has operated as an organization of creative technicians dedicated to re-directing the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, science, and the military away from their typical manifestations in practicality, product or warfare. Since 1979, SRL has staged over 45 mechanized presentations in the United States and Europe. Each performance consists of a unique set of ritualized interactions between machines, robots, and special effects devices, employed in developing themes of socio-political satire. Humans are present only as audience or operators.

I haven't decided exactly what to take from this as of yet, but there is no doubt that it was compelling.

Gary Hill, Conundrum, 1995-98: In this piece, Hill gives us a horizontal bank of six black and white televisions, showing images of body parts floating through the screens, predominantly giving the illusion of being connected, as if the body were one whole. Strobe lighting during photography gave the illusion of motion, though in reality the body moved very little, and appeared as if trapped within the mediaspace. This kind of reminded me of playing basketball at the Panopticon.

George Bures Miller, Imbalance 2, Simple Experiments in Aerodynamics, 1995: Miller's piece is a television hanging within a metal frame, attached to a weight and a motor. On the television is a video showing a human from the shins down, trying to balance on their toes. At intervals, the motor will turn on, causing the weight to rise or fall, and causing the television to sway gently back and forth. Which is causing the imbalance: the human or the machine?

Mariko Mori, Play With Me, 1994: This is a large photograph of the artist dressed in a highly feminized robot/anime costume, standing next to a Sega videogame, looking expectantly at passers-by. The figure conveys a tragic sense of stillness in an otherwise busy Japanese shopping district.

Play With Me, 1994, 305 x 367cm, Fuji super gloss print

Lee Bul, Cyborg W5, 1999: Some feel that cyborg culture offers a chance to eliminate the patriarchal dominance that exists in the human world, and The Uncanny offers a room full of gendered interpretations of the relationship between humans and machines. Cyborg W5, a very aggressive female form replete with some sort of metallic exoskeleton. What's interesting to me is that the sculpture hangs from the ceiling and does not have a head or left leg. Yet you are definitely left with the impression that this female form is technical, competent, and could kick your ass for looking at her the wrong way — missing leg or no.

Other assorted artifacts of cyborg culture that stood out for me: clips from RoboCop, Terminator, and Videodrome; a Nintendo Virtual Boy and Power Glove; a copy of William Gibson's Neuromancer; and merchandise from Astro Boy.

In the resource room at the end of the exhibit hung a bulletin board for audience participation, which asked me: "What is human? What is cyborg?"

My response: Cyborg is about rejecting the limitations of the human body. But it is also about forgetting the magic, mystery, and miracle of human existence. It is positivism taken to its logical conclusion.

So, what of the purported overlap between a university basketball game and cyborg culture?

It became clear when a University of Alberta player was hurt early in the game and came out of the locker room after halftime on crutches. The crutches served as a walking aid for this player, which reminded me of The Uncanny, though this is certainly by no means the only way that athletes use technology to surpass the limitations of their own body — think, for example, of knee braces or steroids.

Anyway, it gave me pause to reflect on Andy Miah's work, which started out in a new media/virtual spaces vein, but has really taken off in the direction of genetic modification. If Grenville's exhibition were to include a room dedicated to cyborgs in sport, Miah would definitely have been tapped as a resource. I look forward to his upcoming book, Genetically Modified Athletes.

I personally don't think that cyborgism is the sole postmodern interpretation of sport, but given the alternatives I have proposed (prosumerism, virtual sport, the metagame) it could be argued that with the high degree of media involvement required for each, they are also in fact cyborgist interpretations.

Can't we bring sport and art closer together — for Moby's sake?

The Red Sox won the World Series! Honest, I swear!

Ralph Wiley discusses Kobe Bryant as NBA puppet master. I wonder who his Malkovich is? Don't we all have one?

Watching Hockey Day in Canada last Saturday on the CBC, it dawned on me how often hockey players look at the jumbotron to review a play after it has occurred. Then I realized how often NFL players do it as well. Since I am usually watching basketball on television, and the players don't have the time to check the jumbotron that often, I didn't grasp the significance of this until now: the production of the televised professional sporting event is non-linear in time, in the same sense that the hip-hop turntablist produces music by playing a record and scratching it back and forth.

McLuhan (1964) notes that:

"In tribal societies, gambling … is a welcome avenue of entrepreneurial effort and individual initiative. Carried into an individualist society, the same gambling games and sweepstakes seem to threaten the whole social order. Gambling pushes individual initiative to the point of mocking the individualist social structure. The tribal virtue is the capitalist vice.

… When we too are prepared to legalize gambling, we shall, like the English, announce to the world the end of individualist society and the trek back to tribal ways" (p.207).

References

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media. New York: New American Library.

The fundamental imperative of sport in modernity is to create a wormhole.

The fundamental imperative of sport in modernity is to function as a vessel of Truth.

Truth in sport is measured by score. Truth is arbitrated by referees and umpires. Fans are the jury and statistics are the evidence.

In a postmodern sport world, where the significance of score is subverted, sport's role as vessel of Truth is cast in doubt. This is frightening to many and why there is such a blind devotion to traditional professional sport consumption: in an uncertain world, sport offers a temporary safe harbour — by assuring us with Truth.

I've been meaning to blog about this for some time now, but have you seen SlamBall, the crazy new made-for-television sport where basketball meets trampolines in a series of violent mid-air collisions and ferocious dunks? Let me tell you, it is something else.

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smithers:

[Aside] Rob Wilson, who played basketball at the University of Toronto when I was playing at Queen's, now plays stopper for the Bouncers. Neat, eh?

[Exit]

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Slate's Robert Weintraub gives an excellent overview of the appeal of the sport, noting that "SlamBall is everything the XFL wanted — and failed — to be. A traditional sport has been stripped down to its most athletic and violent elements, with all-access cameras recording every move while toughs with nicknames like 'The Landlord' and 'Inches' growl and taunt with WWF-like aplomb."

(He also called the XFL a "Spruce Goose", though I prefer "New Coke".)

I think it goes a little beyond that, though. It is the amplified reflexes that is the hook here, the ability to escape the limits of our own bodies. Everything else, we've seen before.

There is one other difference: SlamBall is played in a warehouse studio in Los Angeles with six teams, none of whom have a civic affiliation. They also have a portable studio that they plan to take out on the road, bringing the sport town to town — kind of like the WWF. The moral of the story: SlamBall doesn't carry the carry the expensive stadium infrastructure of traditional professional team sports, yet they still have sport media revenue potential. And if they can keep labour costs down by retiring SlamBall after a few seasons, Warner Bros. will have found a profitable little niche in the professional sports industry.

It's what I call short-product-life-cycle, made-for-television sports, or SPLCMFT sports (for short, heh heh). I think they — SlamBall and future SPLCMFTs taken together — have the potential to cause real problems for the established industry incumbents (read: NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL).

SlamBall CEO Mason Gordon (who is also a player) weighs in with his version of the sport's future.

An excerpt from a Torson Group white paper called Torson Sports Cybernetics:

The greatest Sydney Games of the XXVII Olympiad have started!!! This is a unique opportunity for Torson Group, Inc. R&D to promote the novel multidisciplinary scientific discipline : Torson Sports Cyber-netics — SC for short. This is the Sports Science for the III Millennium,
the Know-How to Make the "Olympic Gold".

SC combines the essential principles of sports physiology, anatomy, biomechanics, and psychology, with mathematical apparatus of modern physics — inside the unique framework of cybernetics, and having the unique goal : the SUPREME SPORT RESULT.

Is it pseudo-science? Maybe. (It's certainly pseudo-English…). But it speaks to a deeper truth: that the health sciences will play a significant role in the evolution of virtual sport.

It is the next chapter in the story of man versus machine.

Garry Kasparov, the number one chess player in the world, drew his six-game series against supercomputer Deep Junior. The match was covered online by X3D, a 3-D Internet imaging company (though I'm not certain what the 3-D effect would have added to the chess match).

"The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem. … I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists." — Marcel Duchamp

Art aside, how does he feel playing on behalf of the entire human species (and superseding the Super Bowl while he's at it)? Or is he?

While surfing through Dj Spooky's web site, I came across an interesting quote by the French artist Marcel Duchamp:

"In the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act, a link is missing. This gap, representing the inability of the artist to express fully his intention, this difference between what he intended to realize and did realize, is the personal 'art coefficient' contained in the work. In other words, the personal 'art coefficient' is like an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed. … All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives a final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists."

(Session on the Creative Act, Convention of the American Federation of Arts, April 1957)

That got me thinking about an enigmatic player from the NBA archives, Pete Maravich. The "Pistol", as he was known, was one of the most electrifying players ever to play in the league, and that still holds true today. In fact, in some ways, he probably was one of the few that paved the way for the highlight reel generation of athletes that exists today. As I mentioned earlier, however, I come from a basketball family, and I never heard of him while growing up. Very interesting.

An excerpt from the NBA's profile on Maravich states:

"Maravich wasn't the first player to dribble behind his back or make a deft between-the-legs pass. But his playground moves, circus shots, and hotdog passes were considered outrageous during his era and, perhaps because he cultivated a freewheeling image, some basketball purists felt he was more style than substance. But Maravich produced huge numbers, first as the all-time leading scorer in NCAA history and later as a potent force for both the Atlanta Hawks and the New Orleans Jazz."

Returning to Duchamp, the relationship between the artist and spectator is certainly worth examination. Here is a player who 'put up numbers', albeit with flair. And when the spectator interpreted the inner qualification of Pistol's performance, it was found lacking, mostly because he never won a championship (or even came close, to be honest).

Yet 25 years after his prime, and 15 years after his passing, posterity has given its final verdict, and rehabilitated a forgotten artist.

So now I am confused. Is the 'art coefficient' the limit that will forever elude attempts to create the wormhole?

What coincidence! In a trend that many are keen to capitalize on, retro is all the rage in pro sport. But is it really retro that we are looking for, or the ability to control our own history?

Slate has an interesting article on a paper written by Cal State Fullerton economist Edward Castronova about the burgeoning economy in the MMRPG Everquest. Here is the abstract of the article:

In March 1999, a small number of Californians discovered a new world called "Norrath", populated by an exotic but industrious people. About 12,000 people call this place their permanent home, although some 60,000 are present there at any given time. The nominal hourly wage is about USD 3.42 per hour, and the labors of the people produce a GNP per capita somewhere between that of Russia and Bulgaria. A unit of Norrath's currency is traded on exchange markets at USD 0.0107, higher than the Yen and the Lira. The economy is characterized by extreme inequality, yet life there is quite attractive to many. The population is growing rapidly, swollen each each day by hundreds of emigres from various places around the globe, but especially the United States. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the new world is its location. Norrath is a virtual world that exists entirely on 40 computers in San Diego. Unlike many internet ventures, virtual worlds are making money — with annual revenues expected to top USD 1.5 billion by 2004 — and if network effects are as powerful here as they have been with other internet innovations, virtual worlds may soon become the primary venue for all online activity.

References

Castronova, E. (2001, December). Virtual worlds: A first-hand account of market and society on the cyberian frontier. CESifo Working Paper No. 618. (Munich: Center for Economic Studies & Ifo Institute for Economic Research).

I was discussing with a colleague last week my idea of high-quality audiovisual renderings of fantasy sport matchups.

His response: "But wouldn't we still need to play games to provide new material?"

My reply: Why? Consider the scenario I am suggesting the story of sport in modernity. Why is this story privileged to exist in perpetuity? We have enough characters already, certainly enough adventures, and most certainly enough information. We can call it The Golden Age of Sport (parts 1 and 2 of course — there has to be a sequel …), and in fine prosumer-like, multimedia, postmodern glory, you can interact with this particular story. It's sort of like how a couple of thousand years later we still read about the gods of Greek and Roman mythology. I always thought that mythology was kind of neat in high school — can you imagine what a kid will think a thousand years from now when he sees how Joe Montana and his army of 49ers would fare on the offensive in a simbattle against General Gruden and his vaunted Cover 2 defence?

It will probably be kind of neat then, too.

But it will be really kick-ass awesome in thirty years.

When we still truly care.

Again, why would we continue to play games? Nobody can afford to see them in person. The stadium or arena infrastructure required to keep a professional league going is financially prohibitive, especially considering that it exists primarily as an information-producing studio (particularly for television images). Salaries are skyrocketing, and the global competition is increasing. The leagues are going to have to get into the simulation business, which then means that the live sport side of the product mix will see squeezed margins, as the aforementioned costs continue to rise and revenues slowly start to migrate to the simulation products, The Golden Age of Sport (parts 1 and 2). The leagues will cannibalize their own athletes out of existence.

"We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures."

– Jean Baudrillard

You might ask why I am suggesting that we will endlessly replay the story of sport in modernity, and then quote Baudrillard that "our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness." It would imply that our historic passions have not withdrawn at all, that we are quite happy to let history entertain us on a regular basis.

That's not what Baudrillard meant. In this case, the "artificial coziness" is the simulated (re)creation of history. It's never having to stray too far from the idyll of youth, never forgetting the days of Mays, or Gretzky, or Jordan. It's the end of the creation of new history.

To view this from a business perspective:

"While we are undoubtedly in an information age, most information is delivered to us in the form of atoms: newspapers, magazines and books. This will change as cheap and (soon) easy to distribute bits begin to edge out atoms, and when the much ballyhooed information superhighway (which is, after all, nothing more than a bit chute) arrives at your door. And when that happens, whole industries will be in upheaval."

– Nicholas Negroponte

The professional sport industry will certainly be in upheaval: The Golden Age of Sport likely means the end of the league governance structure in professional team sport.

Shogan (2002) uses a reading of Foucault to demonstrate how spacetime constraints (micro-technologies) lead to disciplined bodies in sport.

In astrophysics, a wormhole is a theoretical construct that maps one spacetime onto another via a portal in matter. I have adapted the concept of the wormhole to describe the portal in identity between the athlete in meatspace and the virtual athlete, as one spacetime is mapped onto another. The ability to create the portal is dependent on massive amounts of numerical information that describe: the athlete in meatspace; the virtual athlete; and the morphing between the two.

If a wormhole can be created, then it could be argued that virtual sport rejects the disciplinary technologies of sport performance as set forth by Shogan (2002).

References

Shogan, D. (2002). Disciplinary technologies of sport performance. Sport technology: History, philosophy and policy. 21, 93-109.

deconstruction: the star system is the most powerful marketing tool in the history of humankind even though it works by creating a feeling of inadequacy, shame and lack in its consumers while keeping its labour in a hierarchical competition for lottery-style economic rewards, as well as using networked media to imprison both groups in a panoptic schema of mind and body discipline

pastiche = the highlight reel

whose history gets told? = those who put up numbers

how are simulations made? = with numbers

simulation = Strat-O-Matic, fantasy sports, videogames

nature of identity = who is the star tomorrow?

dialectic: participant –><– spectator == 1. the metagame; 2. prosumer media; 3. virtual sport

end of the quest for truth = end of the hegemony of 'score'