What percentage of the truly cool things you find on the Internet occur via completely random Net surfing sessions? It has to be at least a third for me. I was fortunate enough the other day to come across a review of the work of Jordan Crandall, a name that seemed familiar to me. Digging around a bit, I learned that this was the same person who had written an interesting piece for Life In The Wires, titled "Unmanned: Embedded Reporters, Predator Drones and Armed Perception".

From there, I linked to his personal web site, where I found a corpus of work dealing with surveillance, mobilities, fitness and the body athletic. I want to sample three of those pieces here (all of which have been published by CTHEORY), "Bodies on the Circuit", "Ass in Gear", and "Fitness in Wartime". I look forward to learning more about Jordan's work.

Bodies on the Circuit (1997)

Here the body sandwiches itself into a machine, pressed against a smooth contoured surface that has been molded to couple with it, holding it rigid. Securely in place, joints aligned, attention and orientation adjusted, it performs precise, prescribed movements along optimized ranges of motion, internalizing a rhythm of repetition that becomes nearly habitual. The goal is to 'pump up' and literally morph the body into some idealized image held in one's mind like a carrot at the end of a stick. This image is a composite, patched together or collated from vast arrays of representations and self-reflections. Fragmentary and fleeting like a music video, these image-fragments beat to the pulses of the repetitions - 1! 2! 3! — as one interpolates one's body into them, while simultaneously pummeling them directly into the body substrate, as if plying it through sheer force of will. Regarding oneself in the mirror, one sees the idealized images superimposed, stacked up upon and within one's reflection, shuffling, merging, and separating to the beat of the repetition scansion — 7! 8! 9! — and its pulsatile 'deep vision.' Through the conduit of image, enforced temporality, body, and machine, one changes the very contour of the flesh, simultaneously downloading and internalizing the image while uploading the body into the realm of representation. Gasp!

And now a short rest between sets.

Ass in Gear (1999)

A movement constituted through patterns of repetition, enmeshed in circuits, harnessed to social and technical machines. What better way of envisioning the exercise video — One! Two! Three! — and the body-database? In either case, counting equals accounting for, and the body is formatted through arrays of variables and calculations. Movement configures as a kind of statistical articulation. Based on behavior and preference data, as tracked, abstracted, and aggregated in the database, X might, for example, show a 59.6% propensity to move towards Y. As individuals and groups are processed, the public configures as a calculus of manageable interests, opinions, patterns, and functions. This ever more precise and "protective" statistical ventriloquization — stretching over speech like a prophylactic or over pumped-up flesh like spandex — becomes an authentic voice of the people. A marker of speech and presence, a way in which the public is heard and made visible. The machine-image — the exercise-interface — is thus a politicized field of incorporation and identification, marking a network through which social identities and embodied forms are signaled and enacted.

Fitness in Wartime (2001)

Exit couchpotato and screen, meatself and monitor, at home and clicking away upon command. We no longer have subjects and objects that sit; we have relays or clusters through which forms and movements coalesce. We have body/machine/movement clusters, into which a fitting (weapon-gadget) is introduced, and which is enmeshed in an incorporative/integrative dynamic: its visual faculty extended through the network, its rhythms intertwined within the demands and enhancements offered by communications and battle machines, its body lodged within a protective encasing or squeezed within an invasive projectile.

smithers:

[Aside] Someone recently reminded me of the value in periodically stepping back and reviewing one's work over a period in time, in order to spot the recurring patterns and the evolution of ideas during an interval of the ongoing investigation. I suppose that's what my annual birthday greetings to sportsBabel have become: an opportunity for visioning and reflection, perhaps a more sedate version of the peyote trip in the desert taken with similar goals in mind.

We had quite a year in sports: an NHL strike, the Athens Olympics, BALCO, Bartman, and the passings of Road Dog and the good Dr. Thompson, to name but a few events. And in response, I had occasion in this little sports (cyber-) space to be at various times snotty, confused, saddened, angered, amazed, scared, inspired, and clever.

Though the manuscript has only proceeded marginally, I can say without a doubt that this has been my most productive year yet, which makes sense: as I have continued to write, I think my ideas and style have matured significantly in the process. It may not always be apparent on the reader's end, but deep inside I know this to be true.

That said, here is a recap of my top ten favourite posts from the year:

1. Polar Inertia
2. The Sports Information Market (or Jimmy Hits a J)
3. Notes From The Horse Races
4. Questioning Sport and Societies of Control
5. Notes on Baudrillard and the Fitness Club
6. The Sportocratic Simulation of Damiens
7. (S)ender's Game
8. (Simulated) Olympic Sexuality
9. Soccer and the Romanticization of Globalization
10. Afrika (Nike) Shox

Happy 4th birthday, sportsBabel … you've changed the path of my journey more fully than I ever imagined possible. A digitally heartfelt thanks to you.

[Exit]

Not long ago, I discussed how the slowness of the blimp was attractive in the production of sports spectacles, since it allowed for an approximation of geosynchronicity in creating stable television images. Today I want to discuss another application of slowness in accelerated culture.

Virilio (excerpted from Redhead's The Paul Virilio Reader) discusses a mutation in warfare, driven in part by technology, that vectors us towards a state of "ONE MAN = A TOTAL WAR."

Note by way of provisional conclusion that the [1993] attack on the World Trade Centre is testimony to the clever combination of a strong symbolic dimension and an urban demolition capability implicating only a small number of individuals who used a delivery van to deliver terror. In the days of cruise missiles and the most sophisticated nuclear weapons carriers, you have to admit that this is a striking example of political economy!

The 1993 attack was a failure, however. It wasn't until the September 11, 2001 attacks on the WTC that the terrorists showed evidence of lessons learned from the Americans in the First Gulf War: the use of camera-equipped smart bombs, which transmitted images to CNN of an approaching target before vanishing to static, in a unique merging of medium and message, or weapon and reality TV. In a more poignant example of Virilio's new political economy, a similar effect was achieved by the terrorists on 9/11.

It was the slowness of the planes that made them a particularly useful weapon that day. As opposed to the bombs used in 1993, which exploded so fast that television was only able to capture the damage done, the slowness of the airliners allowed one to get their camcorder around in time to view the plane striking the tower — in other words, to witness the actual event taking place.

It was only at this point of critical mass that speed accelerated to the absolute real-time of the image, delivering an experience far more tactile and visceral than seeing the rubble after the fact.

Caroline Fusco, "The Space that (In)Difference Makes: (Re)Producing Subjectivities in/through Abjection - A Locker Room Theoretical Study" in Vertinsky and Bale (eds.), Sites of Sport: Space, Place, Experience (p.172):

Sweat, dirt and some bodily fluid excretions are celebrated in sport for they are a mark of a hard workout (and often a mark of masculinity). … Yet there is a point when all these fluids, excretions and dirt (if these are not expelled onto the ice and into the grass) have to be dealt with, particularly when they start to smell, linger on the athlete's body and mix with the fluids of others. This is when the (social) body is/may be pressed to send these uncanny corporeal fluids somewhere else. … While recognizing that there are social and hygienic reasons for dirt and bodily excrements to be cleaned away, the rites of purification that are engaged in in locker rooms, such as washing, wearing foot protection, avoiding soiled toilet seats and so on, not only protect against infection but protect the subject from becoming (materially and psychically) contaminated by polluting pseudo-objects (like sweat, hair, faeces and urine). They enable respectability and propriety to be (re)produced.

A Zimbabwean athlete receives a 3 1/2-year prison sentence for masquerading as a female athlete (emphasis mine):

Samukeliso Sithole — a triple jumper and runner who competed as a woman at several international sports events — was convicted on charges of impersonation and offending the dignity of a woman athlete who undressed in his presence, unaware he was a man.

. . .

Sithole told the court at his first appearance that he had both female and male organs and that he lived as a woman after consulting a traditional healer. A medical examination showed that he was a man.

Two things jump out at me from this story. One has to do with the "crimes" that Sithole committed: impersonation and offending a woman's dignity. The first seems a little arbitrary to me — though I am not a lawyer, I believe that the crime of impersonation usually involves actually appropriating someone else's identity for personal gain. In this case, Sithole assumed a gender, not an individual identity. The purported offence of dignity is an extension of that gender role, not some Peeping Samukeliso trying to get a glimpse of women in segregated shower rooms.

Not only am I not a lawyer, but I am not a diviner of bullshit either. Nonetheless, let us assume for a moment that Sithole is telling the truth about being both male and female, and that a traditional healer advised that he should henceforth live as a woman. Then we have another example in which modern medical-scientific practice trumps traditional medicine, exposing yet again how the high performance athletic body is discursively constructed and subsequently policed.

Virilio, Pure War, p.54 (via Redhead): "History as the extensiveness of time — of time that lasts, is portioned out, organized, developed — is disappearing in favour of the instant, as if the end of history were the end of duration in favour of instantaneousness, and of course, of ubiquity."

It is at this point, in my opinion, that the Olympic Torch becomes vulnerable. More to follow …

McLuhan and Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village, 1968, p.173:

The world of play is necessarily one of uncertainty and discovery at every moment whereas the ambition of the bureaucrat and the systems-builder is to deal only with foregone conclusions.

. . .

Real play, like the whodunit, throws the stress on process rather than on product, giving the audience the chance of being a maker rather than a mere consumer.

McLuhan and Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village, 1968, p.171:

Games stand in relation to new technology somewhat in the form of clothing. Radio and baseball were well matched, but television has killed baseball and advanced football and ice hockey. Baseball was quite incompatible with the television spectator's role of participation in tactile depth. Baseball insists on careful timing and one play at a time. English cricket would be equally futile on television since its plays are much less frequent. Soccer, however, has had a huge revival with television quite apart from the television watcher. It has been the altered sensibilities of the whole culture in the bodily contact direction that have revived soccer. The new games of surfboarding, water skiing, and snow skiing are fascinating examples of a new taste for dynamic contour exploration in which the participant amidst the most exciting environment is almost entirely visceral rather than visual in his involvement. It can be safely predicted that color television will drive people much further in this direction, for there is a world of difference between color television and black and white.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, p.105:

Just as writing is an extension and separation of our most neutral and objective sense, the sense of sight, number is an extension and separation of our most intimate and interrelating activity, our sense of touch.

. . .

More and more it has occurred to people that the sense of touch is necessary to integral existence.

"Reach out, reach out and touch someone …"

And that is why I prefer the term pantactilism to the dataveillance used by the thinkers at the McLuhan program: rather than placing the emphasis on the evolution of surveillance, as it were, pantactilism — a seeing without eyes, as the blind "see" with their hands — expressly indicates the sense of touch that McLuhan himself found in numbers, what he considered "the language of science."

"'Cellulae' means simply, in Latin - 'little rooms' or 'compartments' - think of the same word applied to cellular networks, cellspace, mobile networks, virtual reality, evolution, nanotechnology, and mobile media - frames per second on celluloid, or lines per millimeter for NTSC and PAL. You've just mapped one metaphor onto another. Biology meets technology in the exchange. And both gain. It's a situation where 1 + 1 = anything." — DJ Spooky

"Thus the highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy's plans, the next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy's forces, the next in order is to attack the enemy's army in the field, and the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities." — Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Just learned from DeLanda's War in the Age of Intelligent Machines that Big Bertha was the name of a heavy mortar howitzer used by Germany to attack France in World War One.

Now it is the brand name of the best-selling golf driver in the world.

Callaway: "Hot and very, very long. The new Big Bertha Titanium 454 Driver delivers the kind of scorching power usually measured in horses."

War-pr0n and balatajaculate? Or a good walk spoiled? You decide.

Recently, as I have been between jobs, I worked three weeks as a painter to help a friend who is a professional contractor. Besides the extra cash in my pocket, the best part about the job was the half-hour commute by bicycle every day to the job site. Wired to the throngs of traffic and my mp3 player, feeling the beads of sweat trickle down my brow as I pistoned through the gears more easily each successive day, enjoying the fatigue in my muscles upon arrival, it was three weeks at a higher level of body awareness.

Now I have been back in front of the computer for the last week and a half, and though my brain crackles, already my body has become more sluggish and out of touch. Somehow I am more tired, though I physically do less.

Is this Paul Virilio's "polar inertia" that we are discussing?

In considering this question, I am reminded of The Phases of Electricity framework postulated by the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology. I think of the slow tectonic shift from an analog and muscular state of existence to one that is digital and cognitive. I think of McLuhan's assertion that we have amputated our central nervous systems by outering them into the global grids of electricity and telecommunications. If this is true, then of course by extension we have also amputated our musculoskeletal systems in the process, an aesthetics of disappearance that lends credence to Virilio's polar inertia hypothesis.

I am also reminded of the electricalamity in Toronto two summers ago. As soon as we unplugged from the grid, all sorts of interesting behaviours emerged, most of which can be described as freeing us from the type of inertia that Virilio describes.

That freedom, as well as the freedom recounted from my biking experience at the beginning of this post, both seem to suggest that one can travel backwards, as it were, to an earlier phase of electricity — at least at this early point on the cusp between the two phases. Though the vector of flow is clearly directed towards an obsolescence of the body, the question is if we will continue to see periodic eddies in the current, in which we "retrieve" the body or parts thereof for one purpose or another.

From the CBC this morning:

Two people are dead and scores injured after seven near-simultaneous explosions rocked London's public transit system during Thursday morning's rush hour.

. . .

Prime Minister Tony Blair said it's "reasonably clear" the attacks were the work of terrorists and aimed to coincide with the opening of the Group of Eight Summit in Scotland.

But is it absolutely clear?

John Robb at Global Guerrillas does a superlative job examining this decentralized warfare at the tactical level — that is, tactics of systems disruption. But what about at the level of strategy?

Is it not at least possible that this is related to London winning the rights to host the 2012 Olympics? That terrorist cells were poised in each of the five finalist cities, each ready to detonate the opening volley in the second battle of what Baudrillard considers to be World War 4? Each ready to deliver this semiotic payload: You are not safe here … We are coming after the globalized Olympic spectacle … Sponsors be warned.

That London was ultimately successful in winning the bid — in a surprise upset it must be noted — while all eyes were on Geldof and the G8ers rocking the free world not far down the road, is sheer providence for the terrorists in this hypothetical scenario, since the televisual politics has everyone looking in the wrong direction for the "reason" why.

Revisiting the concept for the Global Village Basketball project (part one, two):

There's a point — and we'll call it a singularity to use the terminology of Manuel DeLanda — at which all the pickup games of basketball around the world, when networked together, condense from tiny gaseous particulate matter into one fluid meta-game. At this singular point, Global Village Basketball comes into being, and is where score reverses from its competitive origins to become cooperative, which in turn creates a common identity amongst the basketball players on Planet Earth.

I think it's important to understand, in looking at Eichberg's trialectic of sports spaces, that we are not talking here about the Olympics and its 'achievement sport'/production-oriented space, but rather an aproductive 'body experience' space of fluidity and social identity formation. I think it's important because the social identity that is being created is meant to be inclusive: The One Basketball-Loving People of Earth, for lack of a better term.

Again, I have called this before an Anti-Olympics, not so much in the sense of being against the Olympics, but rather in the McLuhanesque sense of an anti-environment through which to interrogate the environment in question. I obviously see Global Village Basketball as being different from the Olympics in many different ways, but I think the primary one is the idea that the Olympics are locally competitive sporting events that culminate, in a hierarchical fashion, with one globally exclusive sporting event at which we're left with precious few competitors and many, many spectators. That's why it has become such a televisual spectacle of sport and body achievement.

As I have pointed out earlier, "the Olympics as cooperative sport experience seems oxymoronic, however, considering that the continued existence of the Games rests on cut-throat nationalist competition for an increasing share of the multi-billion dollar sportocratic economy."

Global Village Basketball, on the other hand, I would argue, is locally competitive (at least it should be), with the idea that the networked local competitions become globally inclusive and cooperative. Inclusivity is embodied in the fact that everyone's competition is essential to accumulating the sum total of hundreds and thousands and millions of points over the particular meta-game period. The inclusivity that makes everyone participant and spectator of their own sporting achievement is what ultimately makes Global Village Basketball the anti-Olympic form of Baron Pierre de Coubertin's modern Olympic revival.