Sports RFID Notes

The RFID tag replaces the jersey number as the protocol that communicates with the primary key ID of the database.

Once pre-programmed, this communication process becomes automated.

This removes the human agency involved in translating the jersey number to the database, ostensibly reducing "error" in the process.

Athletes, then, have only the right to registration in the databank to establish the Truth of their participation in the competition.

Chip manufacturer: "Bear in mind: no chip, no time. Only athletes wearing a ChampionChip will be timed."

More: "A typing error in the chip code during the event registration process will result in your chip being timed without a name. These so-called 'orphan chips' cannot be part of the final results."

We also see the RFID tag (or similar electronic tracking device) emerging in some of the other disciplinary institutions that Foucault analyzed, which now face a "crisis of enclosure":

- Deleuze describes the use of electronic collars as a surrogate technology for prison incarceration.

- Japanese schoolkids have been tagged with RFID to prevent abductions.

- Cadavers are tagged with RFID to control the illegal black market trade in body parts.

We see RFID used to guard against entering the enclosure, exiting the enclosure, and substituting for the enclosure itself.

As Virilio notes: "[S]overeignty no longer resides in the territory itself, but in the control of the territory."

And furthermore: "Whoever controls the territory possesses it. Possession of territory is not primarily about laws and contracts, but first and foremost a matter of movement and circulation."

Date: May 4, 02005
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sportsBabel

sportsBabel examines the aesthetics, politics and poetics of sport and physical culture, weaving between materiality, information, intuition and intellect. The notes posted here should be understood as emerging from an ongoing program of research-creation.

Threads of inquiry include: the security-entertainment complex and the militarization of sport; mediated sport as a spectrum of interactive possibility; the experiential qualities of postmodern sporting spaces; the cyborg body athletic manifest as mobile social subject; and the potential politics of a sporting multitude.

sportsBabel is produced by Sean Smith, a writer and artist from Toronto and a doctoral student at the European Graduate School of Media and Communications in Switzerland. Also a lecturer at various universities in Canada (curriculum vitae), his dissertation is titled "On Performing the University of Disaster."

department of biological flow

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.

The reference is from George Lucas' epic 1971 movie, THX 1138, in which a state-controlled intensification of communication processes manages every facet of daily life in a futuristic society, regulating the flux of all human subjects in work, leisure and love.

Though the Department exists in homage to Lucas’ vision, our consideration of biological flow seeks to reinvigorate the agency of the human subject in its negotiations with economic and political structures both material and immaterial.

www.departmentofbiologicalflow.net

Sports RFID Notes

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