smithers:

[Aside] I rewatched Gattaca last night and wanted to post a few notes:

• according to society, identity is less bound by personality, etc., than by one's genetic profile and the probabilities contained therein, which are established by a blood test at birth
• the knowable body: Jude Law's character prepares the data samples that allow Ethan Hawke's character to assume the "Jerome Morrow" identity — urine, blood, hair samples, fingernail clippings, skin cells — while Hawke must scrub himself to the point where his own body literally disappears and he becomes a "de-gene-erate"
• quote: "And that's the way it was. Each day I would dispose of as much loose skin, fingernails and hair as possible to limit how much of my 'in-valid' self I would leave in the valid world."
• I missed this the first time around, but the title Gattaca is actually composed of letters that form a nucleotide chain: Guanine-Adenine-Thymine-Thymine-Adenine-Cytosine-Adenine

  (I came up with that one myself, but then found that it and other pieces of Gattaca trivia could be found at IMDB.)

  

• while late-19thC/early-20thC art such as Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times or the Animal Locomotion photography studies by Eadweard Muybridge (see "Lawn tennis" above) visions the human body and its cyborgian interaction with machines as strictly biomechanical, Gattaca — and pop culture forms such as sports videogames — vision the body in terms of code/information, a shift examined by Bruce Grenville's exhibition of cyborg culture, The Uncanny
• resample:
  

  The reality of the cyborg body in the popular imagination is that it emerges during the post-industrial shift from a metallurgic society to a semiurgic society. In other words, the cyborg lives in a society of information, of pattern, of code. Thus, the "machine" half of the cyborg is also likely to be one of code: recombinant DNA sequences, organic chemistry chains, electrical positives and negatives, digital zeroes and ones, disciplinary technologies, and collective consciousness will all be leveraged in the realization of a cyborg body. This is not to suggest that the metallurgic will cease to be part of such a body, but rather that it will assume a subservient or relegated role.

• the movie was written and directed by Andrew Niccol, who also wrote The Truman Show.
• unlike The Truman Show, which was entirely about the theme of surveillance, I cannot recall one instance of a surveillance camera in Gattaca

[Exit]

"The destruction wrought on the Pentagon was of little consequence; what exploded in people's minds was the World Trade Center, leaving America out for the count." — Paul Virilio, Ground Zero, p.82

Another tetrad from Marshall and Eric McLuhan's Laws of Media: The New Science (p.150):

ENHANCES -the planet -earth goes inside itself -the first extension-of-earth		REVERSES -implosion -the orb urbs; the globe as theatre -the crowd dynamic -participating in their own audience participation -population reverses from content/spectator to actor/participant
RETRIEVES -ecology -'Primitive man is, inevitably, ecological.' -In The Savage Mind, C. Lévi Strauss noted that the primitive regards everything as related to everything — a condition we recognize as paranoia		OBSOLESCES -Nature -nature: an invention of the Greeks -Lewis Mumford (Technics and Civilization, page 69) called the mine 'the first completely organic environment created by man.' -Like the space capsule, the submarine is also a completely programmed environment. And the scientific laboratory, whether for Pavlovian conditioning, or routine controlled-condition experiences.

Earth extends itself only to go inside itself — or to become its own content. Fascinating.

The satellite has made several appearances on sportsBabel, most notably in discussing the historical relationship between the blimp and the geosynchronous satellite; in pointing out that pirated American satellite feeds of the Super Bowl allow Canadian viewers to see the Madison Avenue advertisements; and in highlighting the recently available Google Maps service and its satellite view.

(With regards to this latter, Keyhole, a Google subsidiary that provides 3D digital satellite imaging solutions, offers three sample videos of their service: a tour of the Athens 2004 Olympic venues (wmv,13Mb); a tour of Boston's Fenway Park (wmv,6.5Mb); and coverage of the war in Fallujah (wmv,3.2Mb) — not the first time we have discussed the link between satellite sport and war on sportsBabel.)

Like the McLuhans, Paul Virilio also describes an obsolescing of the natural environment that occurs with satellite and other telecommunications technologies — creating a new environment that resembles an electronic ecology, no doubt. As I have suggested before, this new ecology renders permeable the membrane between participant and spectator, allowing for the erstwhile spectator's "participating in their own audience participation."

Wired News reports that video game maker Tecmo has settled a lawsuit out of court against the proprietors of a game-hacking web site called NinjaHacker.net. The issue at hand involved custom content created by users for games that had been legitimately paid for, in which reverse-engineering allowed for on-screen customization — in this case, rendering the female characters of Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball completely nude.

As one can see from a quick sampling of the game's original screenshots (ie. pre-nudification), a moral outcry over pornography and the objectification of women does not form the basis of Tecmo's legal challenge. In fact, at popular gaming magazine site IGN.com I was only able to find about a half-dozen images out of 293 in which the women were actually playing volleyball.

Rather, the issue has to do with control over the expression of the intellectual property, as well as silencing any attempts to modify that expression. This silencing extends to the legal settlement, in which the defendants cannot even express themselves with reference to the lawsuit. It is important not to be blinded by the produced sexuality of this event; it is the desire to communicate — an impulse even more fundamental than sex — that is at issue here, and the silence is becoming deafening.

RFID Operations reports that the 12 German stadia hosting games for the 2006 World Cup will embed RFID chips in tickets.

According to the report, Royal Philips Electronics won a contract to provide many of the chips for the 3.2 million tickets that will be needed at those stadiums. For the World Cup games, the RFID tags will be embedded "inside regular paper tickets that can be imprinted with sponsor logos and kept by fans as souvenirs."

Benefits of the system highlighted in the article, many of which I described in the context of bar code-enabled game tickets, include:

• control of access to games
• security
• ease of use
• difficult to counterfeit
• prevents people from passing tickets to others once inside the stadium
• speed up the entrance of fans
• assists logistical adjustments
• contactless and durable

While FIFA claims that the chips will store access information only, and that no personal information will be included, the same cannot be said for regular Bundesliga play after the World Cup is over. The difference is that the former is a short-term event, while the latter is a long-term league with season ticket holders. The expense incurred in modernizing the German stadia for 2006 is simply the cost required to subsequently have that personalized season ticket holder information.

The Cologne system investment was a six-figure investment and is designed to supply payment functions that will eventually boost revenues in fan shops and at concession stands, Däuper says. The electronic payment function is planned for the next season.

"Some people say sales could rise 10%, others say they could rise 40% to 50%," Däuper said, because fans tend to spend more when they don't have to pay with cash for their drinks and souvenirs (emphasis added).

Contactless chips. Frictionless economics. Pantactile data-gathering. Hmmmm . . .

From A Gamer's Manifesto, relevant here for its discussions of camera angles in games, which ties into my notes attempting to extend Benjamin (emphasis in original):

Let's ban all IAC's (Immersion-annihilating contrivances). These include:

. . .

"Cinematic" camera angles. No, thank you. Understand that we need to see what my character sees. As soon as you start panning the camera around Mario for no better reason than to see the pretty sunset on the distance, we lose control. And here's another tip: If you have a single level where the player's character is required to run toward the camera, send the fucker back for more programming because you're not done yet.

. . .

The cameras in 3D games have actually gotten worse (Mario Sunshine's camera system wasn't half as smooth as Mario 64's) because in the game-making world camera and player controls are decided-on after the game's pretty artwork. When 3D games were new the only question was, "how can we make the controls as responsive and fluid as 2D?" Now it's, "how can we show off these really cool-looking trees? That's what the little sons of bitches care about!"

In short, the first 3D games were designed around their cameras, now they're designed around their graphics.

From Virilio's Pure War (p.87; excerpted here from Steve Redhead's Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture, p.114):

[T]he serious problem is that those present, those who participate, those for example who attend an auto race are disqualified by the absentees. The billion people who watch the Olympic Games in Moscow, or the soccer championship in Argentina, impose their power at the expense of those present, who are already superfluous. The latter are practically no more than bodies filling the stadium so that it won't look empty. But their physical presence is completely alienated by the absence of the television viewer. There's a complete inversion, and that's what interests me in this situation.

Virilio is certainly correct here to an extent, in that the stadium becomes a sort of television set, with each game filmed before a live studio audience. I remember when our Acadia basketball team reached the National Championships at Halifax Metro Centre and proceeded to lose our first round matchup. Canadian sports channel TSN, which was covering the semi-finals and final, paid our school band to stay on for the rest of the weekend to improve the 'atmosphere' of those telecasts.

What I think he misses, however, is how this inversion has doubled back on itself, to the point where the absentees are watching a broadcast of the participants watching a broadcast, in a weird twist on reality TV. When at the track, we spend the majority of a horse race watching the steeds on the big screen television in the centre of the infield, only to turn to the charge down the home stretch. At a basketball game, only a small portion of the crowd need actually watch the game at any particular moment to alert the rest as to when live action should begin — the rest of the time we will socialize with our friends and catch replays on the Jumbotron between the commercials.

Virilio continues:

Once the stadiums were full. It was a magnificent popular explosion. There were 200,000 people in the grandstands, singing and shouting. It was a vision from ancient society, from the agora, from paganism. Now when you watch the Olympics or the soccer championship on television, you notice there aren't that many people. And even they, in a certain way, aren't the ones who make the World Cup. The ones who make the World Cup are the radios and televisions that buy and — by favouring a billion and a half television viewers — 'produce' the championship. Those absent from the stadium are always right, economically and massively. They have the power. The participants are always wrong.

Of course, if we forget about the importance of those present, we risk an explosion on the order of the 1985 Heysel stadium disaster. Which is perhaps why Bale suggests a "surgical" space that eliminates the "problem of spectators" altogether — a space that would "satisfy perfectly the norms of achievement sport".

In a different look at "disappearance", Now THAT's Amateur has a fascinating analysis of sports that might be on the chopping block from the official summer Olympic programme.

From Virilio's Pure War (p.89; excerpted here from Steve Redhead's Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture, p.109):

Until the Second World War — until the concentration camps — societies were societies of incarceration, of imprisonment in the Foucauldian sense. The great transparency of the world, whether through satellites or simply tourists, brought about an overexposure of these places to observation, to the press and public opinion which now ban concentration camps. You can't isolate anything in this world of ubiquity and instantaneousness. Even if some camps do still exist, this overexposure of the world led to the need to surpass enclosure and imprisonment. This required the promotion of another kind of repression, which is disappearance.

This reversal from appearance to disappearance is interesting, and I am wondering how it might manifest itself in a hyper-spectacularized professional sporting context. Perhaps the disappearance concerns motion capture and simulation: only the star athlete's movements make it into a videogame.

RFID Update reports on massive overhauls in gambling technology, as casinos plan to roll out gaming chips embedded with RFID tags.

By equipping casinos with RFID readers and RFID-tagged chips, "the house" will be able to detect and monitor those things which the ubiquitous, human-manned video cameras often miss: card counting, dealer mistakes, chip counterfeiting, and chip theft. With every chip in the casino tagged, the possibilities for the detection of scams and loss centers are endless. Indeed, the gambling industry is probably approaching RFID-enabled visibility in much the same way as the supply chain folks: they can already quantify profound efficiencies to be gained, but they expect that even more as yet unimagined benefits will reveal themselves only after the systems are in place.

Like the case of the Boston Marathon described earlier, this appears to be a case of supplementing the panoptic visual sense with the pantactile touch sense. It is the last sentence that requires the most attention, however: what are the "benefits" that will reveal themselves after the systems are in place?

(via Bruce Sterling's cleverly titled Ocean's 11 011011001010111010 post)

From The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (p.159):

1883: Cincinnati Red Stockings first used numbers on uniforms. Practice didn't last.

1916: Cleveland Indians used numbers on uniforms. Practice didn't last.

1929: New York Yankees used numbers on uniforms. Interest in the practice catches on.

1932: National League adopts a league-wide policy mandating numbers on jerseys.

With the recent discussion on sportsBabel about jersey numbers, I wanted to sample Marshall and Eric McLuhan's tetrad for "number" from Laws of Media: The New Science (p.173):

ENHANCES -plurality, quantity -fractioning figures out of their ground -possessions		REVERSES -mere graph, statistic, profile of the crowd -kinetic line of the graph: the language of gesture -pattern recognition
RETRIEVES -zero, blank -interval -math, algebra: the hidden ground of number is letters		OBSOLESCES -holism -notches -knots -symbols -tallies

It seems that there are a number of interesting tidbits here. That numbers facilitate or enhance the ability of a quantity to be possessed seems to be logically consistent with a capitalist ownership of professional sports teams and athletes that requires what Deleuze refers to as an "administrative numeration". In doing so, the holism of the athlete as individual is somehow fragmented and obsolesced.

What I find particularly interesting is what happens to the number when it is pushed to its logical limit and thus reverses. According to McLuhan père et fils, we come upon "profiles of a crowd" abstracted from statistical data sets. Is this not what I was pointing to when suggesting that the database-oriented pattern recognition of sabermetrics carries with it the whiff of eugenics?

(I know that I still haven't fully defended the use of the term eugenics here, but all in due time.)

The jersey number — that is, identifying individuals in a system by placing a number directly on their clothing — is a technology that is almost exclusively unique to modern sport. The other example that immediately comes to mind is that of prisoners in a carceral institution, a relationship that certainly requires more critical attention.

So it is with considerable interest that I read an article in today's Toronto Star I have suggested previously that new communications technologies are perhaps rendering these numbers vestigial, though in this vestigial state they appear to assume new meaning.

Discussing team uniforms a while back, I suggested that beyond the light and dark of home and away jerseys, "specific colours in themselves do not serve any semiurgic function, barring a few exceptions". The exceptions I had in mind related to instances of a specific colour, such as Carolina blue, which defines the entire University of North Carolina community and all of its supporters. I neglected, however, to consider exceptions that featured specific purposes for a widely-used colour.

Take Houston Nutt, the Arkansas football coach, who used to make players who were in trouble wear pink practice uniforms. This is a gendered Othering designed not only to feminize/emasculate the offenders but likely also to enrage the other players on the team, causing them to hit harder — not coincidentally a desired outcome in football.

But Nutt is changing. In a nod to breast cancer survivors, he will stop the practice of using pink jerseys, likely substituting them with the burnt orange of arch-rival Texas.

(Is it just me, or does this smack of a major PR cover-up?)

Perhaps provocatively, David Andrews (Handbook of Sports Studies, 2000) posits an argument that "the focus and goal of a post-structuralist sociology of sport is, and indeed should be, post-sport" (p.116, emphasis in original).

The question is, what does such a post-sport look like? Andrews stresses that, like post-structuralism itself, the prefix "post-" doesn't necessarily refer to something that chronologically follows or obsolesces sport.

Rather, post-structuralism compels researchers to problematize sport's implicit relation to the modern project; a brief which involves developing politically subversive readings of sport which seek to take it beyond — or post — the oppressive, symbolically violent and exclusionary vices of its modern incarnations (p.116).

I would suggest that sportsBabel is chock full of politically subversive readings of the modern sport project. Indeed, I take great pleasure in creating these readings. But is there a danger of spectacularizing the subversive elements of the critique to such an extent that it mirrors that which it seeks to subvert? If so — and in asking, I do not refer to the dry and dusty echo chamber of academe, but rather the bustling cacophony of everyday lived experience — can the revolutionary elements contained therein be communicated any other way?

Virilio theorizes at length about the rise of a "military-scientific complex". Haraway, on the other hand, discusses "high-tech repressive apparatuses" of an entertainment nature in which the fruits of military research and development are incorporated into the latest leisure spectacles. Rheingold also alludes to this cozy relationship between the military and communications interests in the development of virtual reality and spectacle.

Is it possible, then, to merge the two ideas, and consider a military-scientific-entertainment complex, in which the militarization of science (Virilio) is normalized in the production and consumption of techno-fetishized entertainment?

In the context of sportsBabel, can we say that it is the trickle-down of advanced military research into professional sport spectacles that serves to render intelligible and normalize our implicit participation in the project of empire?

Evidence suggests that the relationship does exist. A few examples:

• the 1st-and-10 line, which emerged from technology used to laser-guide missiles during the first Gulf War
• wireless internal thermometers, used both by soldiers in the field and by our cyborg-soldier-athlete football players
• RFID tags on military personnel and athletes
• smell technologies, used by the Israeli army to simulate the stench of dead bodies, and used by gamers to simulate the aroma of fresh-cut golf course sawgrass
• sport hunting by telepresence, which echoes bombing by telepresence (and a Survival Research Laboratories performance critique)
• not to mention televisual surveillance, pantactile technologies, and more

It seems we can answer in the affirmative for the first question, but, so as not to simply offer trite observations, I will suggest that the second question requires substantially further investigation.

Echoing the militaristic bombing of strategic targets by satellite-assisted telepresence, Live-Shot now offers us sport hunting by telepresence, which is assisted by an Internet-connected RifleVision.

Certainly a different take on Sender>>Message>>Receiver, no? Audience, please vote this animal off the planet by typing 3-4-3 into your cell phone. 50 cents a call.

(via Terra Nova)

Scoop Jackson: "LeBron James is not a human being. That's the first thing we need to understand. He is a business. The 'Inc.' that is on Randy's card is what LeBron James is. He's been a business since the eighth grade. America made him be that, and he was smart enough to know it."

From an interview at the high-end of MMORPG guild competition — in this case, the leader of a guild that originated in EverQuest and now resides in World of Warcraft:

Talon noted that having a common goal was also crucial to the success of the guild. When I asked him what that common goal was, his answer was simple - "To be the best". And here, what Talon meant was distinctively different from the achievement-oriented motivations I was used to.

"I mean to be realistic I'm a nobody in the greater scheme of things. No matter how good gear I have, people still won't know. If I paint out some magelo or whatever, it's meaningless really, but what people DO know are the guilds - 'oh shit, the guild that first killed Ragnaros / Onyxia / Quarm / whatever'".

And this was the common goal - not "to be the best" per se, but "to be part of the best". And in fact, individuality is subservient to this overriding goal. When Talon first mentioned that "sharing accounts is the norm", I was intrigued. He then explained that it "allows for flexibility in time". I was still confused and it was only when this practice of sharing accounts was framed under the notion of a common goal that it made sense to me.

"They do not mind at all playing other characters. Their own character is nearly meaningless."

Talon and his guild members all shared in the common goal of advancing the interests of the guild. All individual interests were subservient to this goal. This was what made account sharing the norm. A character was merely the means to advance the interests of the guild. The primary attachment was not to the character you played, but to the guild you are a part of.

(via Terra Nova)