PLSJ has introduced me to Roll_The_Bones, a blog of "Research, Reflections, and Speculation concerned with Risk, Play, and Chance", which features an excellent series entitled Theodor Adorno on Art and Play (Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII). A sample is included here:
Whereas all art sublimates practical elements, play in art ? by its neutralization of praxis ? becomes bound up specifically with its spell, the compulsion towards the ever-same, and in psychological dependence on the death instinct, interprets obedience as happiness. In art, play is from the outset disciplinary; it fulfills the taboo on expression that inheres in the ritual of imitation; when art exclusively plays, nothing remains of expression. Secretly, play is in complicity with fate, a plenipotentiary of the weight of the mythical, which art would like to throw off; the repressive aspect is obvious in such phrases as that of the rhythm of the blood, with which the formal playfulness of dance is so readily invoked. If games of chance are the opposite of art, as forms of play they nevertheless extend into art. The putative play drive has ever been fused with the primacy of blind collectivity. Only when play becomes away of it?s own terror, as in Beckett, does it in any way share in art?s power of reconciliation. Art that is totally without play is no more thinkable than if it were totally without repetition, yet art is nevertheless able to define the remainder of horror within itself as being negative (Adorno AT 317).
Teledildonics and accompanying commentary from Paul Virilio. Will modern sport also continue to experience this sort of "remoting"? Evidence at this point suggests the answer is yes.
Notes from last night's Monday Night Football tilt between Dallas and Washington:
The Model
In this modern incarnation of Cowboys versus Indians, Dallas is now 13-1 over the past seven years. Sounds about true to form.
Opening Credits
Welcome to the full American hyperreality of covering key demographics: Hank Williams crooning, a marching band, the Statue of Liberty, blacks drumming on plastic buckets, whites dancing hip-hop, fighter jets, cheerleaders, pyrotechnics, "authentic replica" football jerseys everywhere, a heavy-duty (made in America!) GMC truck, and a huge Stars and Stripes flag to round out the performance.
Making The Cut
Selecting a team of football players? B166ER isn't necessarily better (just ask OJ).
Tactical
Speed in the running game allows a team to get out of the backfield to the perimeters and attack from the flanks.
Carnivalesque
"Please put me on TV": Hogs celebrate their lipidinal identification.
Cryptography
Reminiscent of the wristwatch decoders that kids used to play with, Cowboys coach Bill Parcells sends in a numbered play, which quarterback Vinny Testaverde decodes on a wristband.
Dehumanization
Star players in MNF games are immortalized on the "Horse Trailer".
A few notes as I attempt to expand upon Walter Benjamin's key essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". The following excerpt is Part VIII of that work:
The artistic performance of a stage actor is definitely presented to the public by the actor in person; that of the screen actor, however, is presented by a camera, with a twofold consequence. The camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral whole. Guided by the cameraman, the camera continually changes its position with respect to the performance. The sequence of positional views which the editor composes from the material supplied him constitutes the completed film. It comprises certain factors of movement which are in reality those of the camera, not to mention special camera angles, close-ups, etc. Hence, the performance of the actor is subjected to a series of optical tests. This is the first consequence of the fact that the actor's performance is presented by means of a camera. Also, the film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance to the audience in person. This permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor. The audience's identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera. Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing. This is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed.
I think it is fair to say that in the age of videogames and other recombinant simulations, the equation changes somewhat.
Stage
Actor identifies directly with audience; he may modify or adjust performance to audience during show; the performance is consumed as it is acted out.
Film
Actor responds directly to camera; cannot adjust performance in response to audience; camera need not respect performance as an integral whole; performance is consumed at some point in time after it is acted out.
Videogame
Actor responds directly to camera, but camera isn't watching; motion capture, green screen and CGI capture points of light that allow for the creation of virtual stick figure components; these components, in conjunction with digital skin wrappings and voice clips, are featured in performances the actor may not have done before in places the actor may not have been before; camera becomes a physical extension or surrogate of the virtual cameras (camera ludica = omnipresent godvision) that exist within the game environment; director may still control these virtual cameras, though the actor does not control the virtual character that features as this particular drama unfolds; in some cases, the performance is consumed before it is acted out.
In this case, not only is the actor's performance not necessarily respected as a whole — but neither is the actor's body.
You had to know this was coming: G4techTV will air virtual hockey. If anything will bring the labour unrest to an end quickly, it will be decent ratings for this show.
LOS ANGELES, CA, September 21, 2004 - The NHL lock out may have postponed the 2004-2005 season, but disappointed hockey fans can still watch the puck drop in more than 50 million U.S. and Canadian homes when the defending Stanley Cup champion Tampa Bay Lightning face off against the Philadelphia Flyers in the season opener of the video game NHL season on G4techTV. The hard-hitting action begins with highlights, scores and stats, airing daily on the network's sports program "Sweat," premiering October 13 at 10:00 PM ET/7:00 PM PT. G4techTV is the only 24-hour television network devoted to games, gear, gadgets and gigabytes.
Continuing to explore the link between sports and war and sports and alcohol:
LONDON, England (Reuters) — The creator of one of the world's most famous guns, the AK-47 assault rifle, has launched another weapon in Britain — Kalashnikov vodka.
Lt. Gen. Mikhail Kalashnikov, who invented the AK-47 after being shot by German soldiers during World War II, said Monday he wanted to continue "the good name" of his gun.
Anne Galloway is In Search of Play: "So what would a non-structural approach to play look like? What is the space of play? How can play serve as a method of critical inquiry?"
Just finished William Gibson's Virtual Light, and I will have to admit that of his novels I have already read (which also include Neuromancer and Idoru), it is my least favourite. However, a motif that weaves its way in and out of Gibson's work is the nature of celebrity, and I wanted to capture a sample of it from Virtual Light that I found quite interesting:
Separated at Birth was a police program you used in missing persons cases. You scanned a photo of the person you wanted, got back the names of half a dozen celebrities who looked vaguely like the subject, then went around asking people if they'd seen anybody lately who reminded them of A, B, C … The weird thing was, it worked better than just showing them a picture of the subject. The instructor at the Academy in Knoxville had told Rydell's class that that was because it tapped into the part of the brain that kept track of celebrities. Rydell had imagined that as some kind of movie-star lobe. Did people really have those? Maybe Sublett had a great big one. But when they'd run the program on Rydell in the Academy, he'd come up a dead ringer for Howie Clacton, the Atlanta pitcher; he didn't remember any Tommy Lee Jones. But then he hadn't thought he looked all that much like Howie Clacton, either (p.94).
Connected ramblings:
ESPN.com's Here's Looking At You
Access Control and Security Systems: a trade mag look at the introduction of facial recognition technology to the 2001 Super Bowl
On motion capture technology, from the documentary for the making of the videogame Enter The Matrix: "The cameras can't see the actors, or the set, or anything but the little sensors that we place on them."
To return to Benjamin, instead of the actor responding to a live audience, or being judged directly by the camera, the actor essentially disappears, save for a few strategically important nodes of light.
Notes from last night's Monday Night Football tilt between Minnesota and Philadelphia:
Speed
Equipment has improved from the days of leather helmets to the space-age, air-injected techno-helmets that exist today. Hitting has gotten harder, collisions more violent, and the league wealthier. As we retreat more deeply into the (false) security of our pods, we tend towards increasing speed — and cybernetic control.
Intertextual Celebrations
Donovan McNabb: the moonwalk
Terrell Owens: dunking the ball and hanging on the rim
Panauralism
Inverting KGB secrecy into ABC spectacle, Minnesota's Randy Moss is wired for sound, bringing panauralism to sport.
40
The image-sign for this season is the #40 of Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinal turned Army Ranger who was killed in battle, yet will live indefinitely on videoscreens and football helmets around the United States.
Flip Side of the Sports Media Coin
At one point, TV drove videogame innovation: think instant replay, commentators, and picture-in-picture features coming to your favourite game titles.
Now we have videogames driving TV innovation: think 1st-and-10 line, Michael Jordan's use of "bullet time" technology to re-create his famous dunk, and ABC's skywire camera that runs on pulleys and wires above the gridiron to plot any co-ordinate on the field.
The key distinction today is that of simulation: 1st-and-10 simulates a line that is painted on the football field; the other technologies simulate the virtual cameras that allow for "impossible" shots to be taken.
Guardian Unlimited: The man who lost his past, about Merhan Karimi Nasseri, who has spent 16 years living in Charles de Gaulle airport.
But I was curious - there were still things I wanted to know. The Alfred I knew was mentally ill. Had there ever been signs of it when he was younger? "No, no, not at all!" said Mina. "If there is something wrong with him now, it's not from the past. It must have happened to him there." This supported what Alfred's lawyer had said to me. He had arrived sane at the airport. At some point along the way - no one knew quite when - Alfred tipped over into madness. His life was indeed ruined by the absurdities of bureaucracy.
A few notes after reading the post on "Phases of Electricity" from the McLuhan Program weblog yesterday:
The analog phase of electricity
Professional sport athletes use their muscular power and mental abilities to create uncertain outcomes as well as certain streams of information and images. These streams are used to create virtual identities that are then transferred to consumers of fantasy sports and videogames. In this phase, a ratio of body-mind expenditure would see muscular effort as being very high and cognitive effort being very low.
The digital phase of electricity
Moving more fully into the virtual world of MMORPGs (in this case Everquest), Castronova notes the existence of a very real economy in which identities are created, powered-up and sold on Ebay to those who do not wish to go through the time and effort to create one for themselves. Muscular expenditure drops substantially, while cognitive expenditure increases substantially.
The quantum phase of electricity
This is where things get very hazy. Is it possible for a state to exist that approaches zero muscular expenditure and infinite cognition? If so, is this the Singularity and posthumanity? Is it the irreality of The Matrix? Is it transcendence? Or is it all of the above?
A framework on "Phases of Electricity" from Derrick de Kerckhove, Mark Federman and others over at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology. The parallels to my own work here at sportsBabel are very evident (to me), and I will try to expound on them more clearly in the very near future. In the meantime, I think this will prove to be a very exciting and useful thinking tool.
| Analog |
Digital |
Quantum |
| Muscular |
Cognitive |
Existential |
| Heat, light, motion; Extension of body via electromechanical devices |
Connected, emergent consciousness; Obsolescence of body as it becomes smaller relative to its extensions in digital space |
Emergent beings formed via pervasive proximity (infinitely many entities packed into zero space) |
| Cyborg (pre-cyber); the interface boundary is ground |
Cyber (post-cyborg); interface is obviously evident (moves from ground to figure), becoming ubiquitous and hence, obsolescent |
Transcendent (post-cyber; i.e. no distinction in reality between cyber and physical) |
| Surveillance |
Dataveillance |
Emergent transparency (reversal of dataveillance) |
| Non-reality is ground effect; "on the air, man becomes no-body" |
Remote control is ground effect; our digiSelves become the voodoo dolls through which we are controlled and manipulated. |
Mysticism is ground effect; connection to the "higher consciousness" that exists in the plasma of simultaneous experience |
| Public identity; celebrity (inflection point of obsolescence of privacy; e.g. paparazzi) |
Digital persona; publicy |
Emergent identity(ies) as an attribute of tribal affiliation(s). |
global+village+basketball is an internationally-networked game of pickup basketball that first took place on June 10, 2009. It is also part of a doctoral project by Sean Smith on networked sport and community politics. 
The Department of Biological Flow is a project of research-creation by Sean Smith and Barbara Fornssler exploring the concept of the moving human body as it is integrated with broader information networks of signal and noise.
I provide new media consulting services to grassroots, amateur and professional sports organizations on these and other topics in the areas of technology, strategy, and creative development.
Feedback: 0 comments | Permalink: url