American Sporting Alphabet

Design Notes

In homage, and with apologies, to Heidi Cody's American Alphabet.
Many of the logos are from Chris Creamer's Sports Logos page.
I have wanted to do this for sports since I saw Heidi's installation three years ago and blogged about it. However, I just recently got access to the software to do so (PowerPoint could only take me so far).
Update: I just found out that Kurt Hunzeker at Sparts Marketing Blography did a similar project last year. He goes in a very different direction, looking to show the breadth of sports letters and logos, including minor league franchises. On the other hand, I was looking to show iconic images that represented a particular American sporting tradition with its teams, management and media influences. Only 2 of our choices were the same.

Letter Notes

With the way this franchise has changed the business of baseball, and indeed all of team sports, it had to be included.
Apologies to Philly, but you had no really good P that was more visually dominant than these Hoosier-state ballers, and without that, you're just Illadelphia.
I thought the fact that this franchise redesigned its logo specifically because of Yao Ming and the potential of the Chinese market spoke volumes to the globalization of professional sports.
My one nod to the college sports scene, and who more appropriate than the "outlaw" football program of the '90s.
From the all-black fives era of basketball nearly a century ago.
Interesting juxtaposition with F.
Only real cheat in the bunch, but significant in how it shows the logo redesign (and awkward transition) from the New Orleans music scene to Mormon country.

Date: May 18, 02006
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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, an artist, writer and athlete living in Toronto, Canada. He holds a PhD in Media Philosophy from the European Graduate School in Switzerland and has exhibited and performed internationally as part of the Department of Biological Flow, an experimental collaboration in arts-based research inquiry with Barbara Fornssler. He was the inaugural Artist/Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Western Ontario in 2011-12, a participant at the Wood Land School – The Exiles residency in 2013, and one of the curators of Channel Surf, a 200km canoe journey and open platform for the arts that was one of 5 projects worldwide accepted to Project Anywhere in 2015.

He is currently adjunct faculty in wearable sculpture at OCAD University, a sessional lecturer on cartographies of the control society at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and one of the founding members of the Murmur Land Studios curatorial collective -- an experimental field school initiative begun in 2017 that offers event-based pedagogy in art, philosophy, kinaesthetics, ecology and camping community for the post-anthropocene era.

Sean's poetic work has appeared in Brave New Word, One Imperative, a glimpse of, Inflexions, the sexxxpo pwoermds anthology and the Why Hasn't JB Already Disappeared tribute anthology to Jean Baudrillard. He has performed poetic-philosophy work at Babel, Tuning Speculation, the Blackwood Gallery's Running with Concepts conference, and the Art in the Public Sphere speakers series at the University of Western Ontario's Department of Visual Arts. His first full manuscript, Overclock O'Clock, was published by Void Front Press in 2017, while three other chapbooks, tununurbununulence vOo.rtex, Verbraidids, and Syncopation Studies have been released in the past year.

sportsBabel was the basis for the Global Village Basketball project (2009-2011), which was an unfunded 24-hour basketball event that attempted to network together various pickup games from around the world into one meta-game; at its peak, players from 9 different countries joined the game to collectively score over 2,000 baskets in a meta Red vs. Blue contest. His other sports-art work has been presented in such varied spaces as HomeShop in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics, the Main Squared community arts festival in Toronto, SenseLab's Generating the Impossible research-creation event in Montreal, and in the courtyard of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art during Nuit Blanche.

His latest project, Aqua Rara, weaves a practice of embodied art-philosophistry together with athletics and kairotic time to work as a performance-text between myriad water ecologies, swimming gestures, and watching the Aquarium Channel endlessly on loop.

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 (in)human subject in its negotiations with economic and political structures both material and immaterial.

www.departmentofbiologicalflow.net

American Sporting Alphabet

Design Notes

Letter Notes

Comments

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