Can yoga practised today in a rational, square studio space truly claim to fully represent and embody the rich philosophical and historical tradition of yogic practice? Is a disclaimer made at the door?

Purposely engaging in conduct that constitutes a substantial step in a course of conduct planned to culminate in the commission of an anti-doping rule violation. Provided, however, there shall be no anti-doping rule violation based solely on an attempt to commit a violation if the person renunciates the attempt prior to it being discovered by a third party not involved in the attempt.

Internalize the gaze before someone else sees you. And yes, in medieval religious tones, they did use the word "renunciate".

<!–a series on antony gormley and the origin of "tactile burden", in no particular order–>

Feeling Material VI
Antony Gormley
2003

When Antony Gormley made his presentation at EGS I was struck by an apparent dematerialization of the human body in his work over a period of twenty-five years. The first two works I want to describe here were catalysts for me in "putting it all together", so to speak, as I had never really considered myself someone who critically appreciated or even liked sculpture.

But Feeling Material really spoke to me: for Gormley the project was an attempt to "make the internal space of the body visible as a void … as a still place at the centre of a spiraling energy field," and I could really see a body coming to terms with its relationship to an omnipresent world of electricity and information networks.

The body as producer and consumer of information: while interacting with other bodies in material space it also extends beyond the skin into data networks to interact with other, virtual, bodies. But even in the dematerialized state it is continually presented with the material.

Hence I was intrigued to see the next work in his presentation, Clearing, in which the energy of the body finally sheds its fixity in space and expands to fill the entire container of the room as if a liquid.

Clearing IV
Antony Gormley
2005

Of Clearing, Antony Gormley writes:

I was trying to destroy the fixed co-ordinates of a room and make a space/ time continuum (a line without end) that was both a thing and a drawing. … This installation acts as a kind of vector field, encouraging the viewer to move through its structure, and in so doing, disrupts the authority of a single-point perspective, necessitating instead a constant renegotiation of the visual field.

If one were to read Gormley's words through a Deleuzian lens, it seems that he seeks to find a smooth space within the rigid enclosure of the room's cuboid structure. The purpose of striating space is to effect a rational logic and constrain the movement and speed of bodies; political docility and productive, economic efficiency and utility. But smooth space presents a challenge to this desired effect of the State, and so there arises a secondary desire: to invert the exterior striation that constrains the body's movement so that it becomes a general striation of the body itself. As mentioned already, this concerns the flows within the body, as with the visioning that occurs in the case of doping and the determination of a "normal" athletic body. But it also serves increasingly to track the body and its contours in an open, fluid space that resists an easy fixed optical perspective necessary for striation. Instead of an optic gaze, we turn to a haptic solution.

As Deleuze illustrates in "Postscript on the Societies of Control," discipline functioned as a series of discrete spaces linked in a process of analogy: the prison was like the factory, which was like the school, and so on. Each space is coded in a fashion related to its striation; the code provides the technique for the striation to take place. With the flowing smoothness of control — the space of continuous modulation — what provides the coding for political control to take place? In the absence of analogy, what is the constant as we move from one environment to the next, in and out of enclosures and boundaries, traversing the passage from real to virtual and back, flowing with migrations great and small as they vector across the planet? The constant code is the code of the body: its internal chemical composition; its fingerprint swipe, retinal scan and DNA profile; its form in a digitized negative space.

Shift V Antony Gormley 2006	Bubble Matrix (vertical swimming pose) Antony Gormley 2007

Consequently, we might read two of Gormley's later sculptures that fashion the human body in negative space, Shift V and Bubble Matrix, as aesthetic precursors to a political concept that we shall label volumetric striation. This volumetric striation is the capture of the human body in a three-dimensional grid-like form (wireframe), such as what occurs with a motion capture video apparatus. Because of the irregular form of the human body, this striation is not a perfectly rational tesselation of congruent squares covering a plane with horizontal and vertical coordinates, as we see with other striated grid spaces. Instead, it is a connected set of irregularly-shaped polygons covering the surface of a three-dimensional solid form, with the connections dependent on where the nodal points of light have been located on the body. Given the technological constraints of motion capture systems right now, it is not a tight striation that is effected, though it is getting tighter as the technology both improves and lowers its unit cost.

Out of technological necessity, volumetric striation in sporting contexts — for example, with motion capture systems that record player movements to be used in sports videogames — is still reliant upon a referential planar striation, the disciplinary sporting enclosure derived from Foucault in the work of Eichberg, Bale, Shogan and others. We are, however, starting to move away from this relation of dependence. With Michael Jordan's "bullet time" dunk we simulate high-speed photography using a circular arrangement of cameras and synthesize a volumetric form from the collection of produced images. Similarly, ProZone uses many cameras in conjunction with a rectangular soccer pitch to track bodies in smooth space. Finally, the EyeToy captures representation volumetrically using light contrasts before embedding the virtual body in a videogame space.

In other words, it appears that the process of striating the body volumetrically may be detached from the planar striation of the enclosed grid in material space (though it will still continue to be attached to a planar striation of the tabular database form). If Gormley seeks to undermine "the authority of a single-point perspective, necessitating instead a constant renegotiation of the visual field," then "State" politics must also eschew the authority of a single-point perspective in response. As the sporting examples above suggest, connected networks of CCTV cameras used for surveillance purposes, though irregularly distributed throughout cities, may be able to effect a volumetric striation of human bodies in large, open spaces as a technique of panhaptically leveraged control.

Motion capture: Model a subject on the lam in three dimensions. Toggle between first- and third-person perspectives. Simulate likely alternatives. Capture motion.

It is not groundbreaking to recognize that the higher the resolution of such a three-dimensional model, the closer we get to a representation of the "real" human body. Ideally, if we could get a polygonal resolution to the granularity of a skin cell, you would have a "perfect" representation from a visual perspective. But what is important with Gormley's work in Shift V and Bubble Matrix, in my opinion, is that he shows how faithfully one can represent the human form with a minimal number of interconnected polygons. Put in political terms, it seems that he is illustrating how relatively low-resolution the volumetric striation need be in a networked open space to have dramatic consequences for the body being imaged.

The same might currently be said of sports videogames and other communication forms of their ilk. Should we consider the sports-media complex, then, to be part of a larger assemblage we might call the sports-media-control complex?

If we were to separate content and form volumetrically to capture real-time sports television images, then one of the formal elements that could be marked up with a stylesheet could be corporate sponsorship. Stadium sponsorship banners could be tagged to display those with whom the organization currently has a sponsorship deal, even if a "classic" game is being viewed.

Wark points out that "the archive is a vector through time just as telesthesia is a vector through space." Currently, sponsorship at the sports stadium constitutes the purchase of a vector through space. By separating content from form and marking-up sponsorship as described above, the advertiser will increasingly be purchasing a vector through time instead.

In Archive Fever, Derrida writes:

The archons are first of all the documents’ guardians. They do not only ensure the physical security of what is deposited and of the substrate. They are also accorded the hermeneutic right and competence. They have the power to interpret the archives (p. 2).

What does this separation of content from form do to the "fact" of the archive? Will we someday see a corporate sponsor embedded in an archive that predates the sponsor's existence? Who will control the hermeneutic right to interpret the archive?

Most contemporary web sites can be characterized by two primary features. First, they are dynamically generated by database-driven content, and second, this content is kept separate from its eventual form. With sportsBabel, for example, Wordpress stores each post in a MySQL database and when the page is loaded, a PHP file calls for various fields (eg. post header, post body, date, author) to be retrieved in a particular order and structured in a particular way. But that only gives us a web page with plain text and images; how does the data retrieved from the database get sorted into the appropriate places on the page, how does the header for every post become blue and how does the footer for every post get marked up with barcodes?

Form is given to the page's data just before it is displayed when the PHP file calls what is referred to as a cascading style sheet (CSS). Essentially, the CSS file says, take every piece of data that has been structurally referred to as "header level one" and make it bigger, blue, Trebuchet MS font, etc. The CSS for this type of style looks like this:

h1	{
	padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
	margin: 0px 0px -3px -1px;
	color: #333399;
	font-weight: 600;
	font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Helvetica, sans-serif;
	font-size: 24px;
	line-height: 24px;
	letter-spacing: -1px
	}

The beauty of CSS lies in its scalability: when you have a web site of three pages, making layout changes or site redesigns is not that much of a hassle. But when your site is database-driven and/or grows to hundreds or thousands of pages (if sportsBabel was created manually, it would comprise over 1,000 pages), trying to change "header level one" to a dark green serif font is a major challenge. The beauty — and practicality — of keeping form and content separate in web site design becomes readily apparent.

But what about with television? Could we see the same thing happen in TV program design?

From time to time I will flip to the Raptors TV channel and catch some of an NBA Hardwood Classics game. Though the games are usually from the early 1980s to the mid 1990s, I am always startled at first glance by how dated they look. Have televisual production and distribution technologies really made such great strides in a decade and a half? (Keep in mind that my personal televisual consumption technologies haven't exactly made astonishing gains: I'm watching digital cable on a old tube television, not Hi-Def on a 1080p plasma.)

If so, then why hasn't anyone anticipated such improvement and worked to ensure that libraries of legacy footage will always look as pristine as the technology of the day will allow? Why should the technical limitations of the medium today be the determining factor in how it will be presented years from now? In other words, is it not better to capture the content separately and then mark it up form-wise at the time of presentation such that an NBA Hardwood Classics game doesn't look so, ummm … classic?

The reason we don't do it today is that we tend to conceive of television in two-dimensional terms, despite the fact that it has been reduced to this plane from a three-dimensional reality. But television doesn't really exist anymore, does it? In other words, even if we still believe that we are watching a planar, "television" medium, we need to get beyond the limits of a two-dimensional mindset.

The technology to separate the content and form of three-dimensional data currently exists. This type of "photography" is essentially what occurs with motion capture in the construction of sports videogames. Capturing points of light as content allows for the digital creation and replication of a wireframe skeleton on top of which formal elements such as flesh, hair, uniforms and running shoes may be added. But motion capture photography takes place months before game production is completed and viewing by the public occurs. For form and content to be separated in a live sports television environment, however, we need to shrink this temporal lag and capture athletes volumetrically in real-time.

Of course, this is a major leap technologically-speaking, but one that is presumably solved as chip processing and graphics rendering solutions become faster and cheaper. Another challenge for live three-dimensional sports television production is the motion capture suit that allows for different points of light to be isolated by the camera, which is prohibitive for normal athletic performance. But other technologies are beginning to erode the dependence on such a suit for the creation of volumetric imagery. The "bullet time" simulated high speed photography for Michael Jordan's IMAX dunk, ProZone's soccer athlete tracking system, and the EyeToy videogame interface are all making rapid advances in what is possible without the requirements of a traditional motion capture apparatus.

From here, one could "mark-up" the volumetric content with formal stylesheets that, for example, could change a team's uniform colours, improve the lighting conditions at the arena, customize the corporate sponsors for different audiences, or take advantage of other output devices that might follow the television, such as a holographic projector. In other words, the static archival document is no longer the sole option for professional sports leagues going forward.

What timing!

(Pun intended.)

Almost as if he knew I was working on this very topic, Mexican politician Roberto Madrazo was disqualified recently from the Berlin Marathon after winning his age group category. No Ruiz he, it is how Madrazo was caught that is of interest to sportsBabel, with the 55-year-old former presidential candidate captured by the machinations of the control society.

At first glance, it appears to be a matter of touch:

On Monday, race officials said they had proof that Madrazo had taken a shortcut. An electronic tracking chip in one of his running shoes showed he had skipped two checkpoints and appeared to have run one nine-mile section faster than any human being on record, taking only 21 minutes.

"Not even the world record holder can go that fast," the race director, Mark Milde, told The Associated Press. (The record for 15,000 meters, about 9.3 miles, is 41 minutes 29 seconds, set by Felix Limo of Kenya in November 2001.)

But upon further examination, it might be a matter of vision after all:

But a sports photographer, Victor Sailer, wondered why Madrazo was wearing a jacket, a cap and long tights on a day when most of the runners finished the race in sweat-soaked T-shirts and shorts. Sailer showed his photo to race officials and raised the possibility that Madrazo might have broken the rules.

Touch or vision? Whatever the answer, it appears that for Madrazo, "who used his marathon-running as a metaphor for his determination and steadiness in campaign advertisements," the consequence is poor optics.

I have been wondering about spaces used in combat sports, almost all of which are formed by regular polygons: from the circle of sumo, to the square of boxing, to the octagon of mixed martial arts.

The circle is known in many cultures as the perfect shape or form: all lines of force radiate perfectly from the centre of the circle to its perimeter. In gladiatorial sports contested within a circle (which also include freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling and various forms of animal combat) motion is continually assured by the degrees of freedom that this geometrical form allows; even when against the perimeter boundary there is plenty of room to maneuver.

The square competition area in organized boxing has existed at least since the institution of the London Prize Ring rules in 1743. Why the square (ironically referred to as a ring) instead of the circle for boxing? Is it because of the strong linear references characteristic of architectural forms in the modern age?

(As an aside, the circular area of competition in Greco-Roman and freestyle wrestling is inscribed on a square mat, which is then rolled up into a cylindrical form for storage. Similarly, the circular sumo dohyo is inscribed on a raised square platform, which presumably is meant to honour the historical traditions of the sport while fitting into the rational rectilinear spaces of modern Japanese arenas. Was this always the case for spectatorship of sumo?)

With the square, we cannot make the same claims to maneuverability mentioned earlier, despite its perfect symmetry on all axes that bisect the centre point. Lines of force are fairly constrained along horizontal and vertical dimensions, which leaves dead spots of motion in the corners — the last thing a boxer wants to do is get trapped in a corner with no line of flight to escape. This is not to say there is a dead spot in action; to the contrary, the constraint on motion often yields to a violent increase in action.

As for the octagon of mixed martial arts, it seems to exist primarily as a form of differentiation from other combat sports that serves an important role in the brand strategy of the Ultimate Fighting Championship organization. But beyond this pragmatic association, the octagon seems to offer us, by way of superficial observation, a hybrid of the two spaces mentioned already. Geometrically, this makes sense to us: a circle is nothing more than a regular polygon with an infinite number of sides, so the fact that the octagon doubles the number of sides of the square suggests that it will be more like the circle in the way it structures movement possibilities within.

We notice the difference particularly in the corners of each polygon: the interior angle of a boxing ring (black line) measures 90 degrees, while the interior angle of a mixed martial arts octagon (red line) measures 135 degrees, giving combatants in the latter space 45 more degrees of freedom to maneuver should they become trapped in a corner. What does this mean in terms of practical consequences? It suggests a competition with more mobility, more movement, and more action.

But we must qualify this last term: what do we mean by "action"?

In the glory days of prizefight boxing last century, action often meant a flurry of punch combinations being rained down on a boxer trapped against the ropes or in the corner; large, lumbering, powerful boxers, relics of the industrial age. Action today, by contrast, is far more about speed, with the goal being to sacrifice as little of the earlier gains made in power as possible. Thus, the newfound mobility offered by the octagon creates new kinds of strategic challenges as part of the action. How does one engage an opponent without sacrificing too much power in the more open space at the middle area of the octagon, or when retreat by the opponent is more easily possible, particularly in a lateral sense?

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.424 (boldface emphasis added):

The State apparatus is thus animated by a curious rhythm, which is first of all a great mystery: that of the Binder-Gods or magic emperors, One-Eyed men emitting from their single eye signs that capture, tie knots at a distance. The jurist-kings, on the other hand, are One-Armed men who raise their single arm as an element of right and technology, the law and the tool. … This is not to say that one has exclusive right to signs, the other to tools. The fearsome emperor is already the master of large-scale works; the wise king takes up and transforms the entire regime of signs. What it means is that the combination, signs-tools, constitutes the differential trait of political sovereignty, or the complementarity of the State.

Can we not suggest that the two poles of sovereignty as they constitute the sporting Empire might be the sports-media production complex and the world anti-doping authorities? The first symbolically represented by the eye of CBS and the second by the juridical arm of Dick Pound?

Spectacle and the cosmos of sign-constellations. Surveillance and the endocolonization of the body athletic. The first already the master of large scale works in terms of a massive, "networked" televisual production and distribution system rivaling the great aqueducts of Ancient Rome. The second taking up and transforming the regime of signs, for example by substituting the press conference for the podium ceremony as in the case of Beckie Scott, who was awarded a gold medal two years after the fact. One, an economy dependent on speed; the other, a nexus of power that seeks to curtail or limit speed.

Now, the interior of the running body becomes the smooth space within which this athletic war machine operates. What new methods, techniques, modalities, substances, agents might facilitate the quest for speed? The nomadic running-warrior continually seeks to find out and, consequently, its body must be striated, visioned, measured and administered by the State. In concert with the Newtonian physics that describe the earlier regime of disciplinary technologies, we now find biological, chemical and information systems subsumed under a contemporary regime of semiotic control: Nielsen ratings, steroid structures, world records, Q-scores, urine metabolites and markers, sponsorship contracts, masking agents, metres per second squared; all related on the one hand to global flows of capital and on the other to protein structures in the athletic body.

As an aside, the traditional nation-state plays a subordinated role in both of these poles of sovereignty. The media companies and their corporate sponsors are increasingly subject to the tides of global commerce and transnational capital, while becoming less beholden to national boundaries and laws. And WADA, which is a direct descendant of the International Olympic Committee, is today only tangentially accountable to its individual member nation-states. What complicates matters, however, is that most of the high-performance sport that attracts the interest of WADA (and to a lesser extent the sport-media complex) is still contested under the paradigm of nationalism.

The following constitutes the conclusion of a paper I just presented in Copenhagen:

A central concern in Bale's analysis of high performance running is the space-time compression that occurs as technologized runners traverse standard spatial distances in ever-shorter temporal quantities. But we must draw a distinction between the imperatives of capital and those of the State (Deleuze & Guattari, ATP; Hardt & Negri, Empire). A world-class running athletes embodies a massive fixed capital investment that seeks maximal speed and the potential financial reward that entails, while the State seeks to maintain a perceived level of ethical integrity for its own spectacular purposes.

Bale's analysis refers to the acceleration of capital in its various forms and one of the ways in which the State seeks to control these bodies is by introducing a space-time dilation to offset the compression. The fully automated photo finish system essentially expands the final tenths of a second at the conclusion of a race so that the administrators may optically adjudicate the speeding bodies and determine a race victor. Similarly, where the wide space of the marathon creates permeability in the tight disciplinary enclosure normally understood with achievement sport, the State attempts to fortify the barriers between spectator and participant by using radio frequency transponder chips to compress the marathon sportscape.

Thus, the State, in the form of the International Association of Athletics Federations, is presented here as establishing countervailing impulses or rhythms of spatiotemporal compression or dilation in a controlling response to the unchecked immanence of high performance running bodies. Based in the tactile nature of networked electronic technologies this control may be described as panhaptic, which suggests that new tools are required to think beyond optical surveillance and conceptualize resistance to structures of authority, both within sporting cultures and in broader society.

And I'd like to juxtapose this with a passage from Henri Lefebvre's Introduction to Rhythmanalysis (p.15, emphasis in original):

Everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time, and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm. Therefore:

a) repetition (of movements, gestures, action, situations, differences);

b) interferences of linear processes and cyclical processes;

c) birth, growth, peak, then decline and end.

A reminder — With the introduction of RFID chips to the marathon sportscape, there is effected a doubling of time: the time measured by the master race clock (race time) and the database time recorded with the RFID device (chip time). While the IAAF recognizes chip timing as official in most cases, timing provided by a chip system is not accepted under any circumstances for the purposes of determining record performances. This makes the question of why the chip identity is so important even more crucial. Almost every technological innovation in sport is designed to enhance performance and/or improve archival measurement techniques, which cannot be said for the RFID chip, save for the (contentious) claim that it allows one to better measure personal best times.

No, this chip and its split, shadow time exists to striate a heretofore large, open smooth space — and to track objects through said space.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.415:

Holey space itself communicates with smooth space and striated space. In effect, the machinic phylum or the metallic line passes through all of the assemblages: nothing is more deterritorialized than matter-movement. But it is not at all in the same way , and the two communications are not symmetrical. … Here, we would say that the phylum simultaneously has two different modes of liaison: it is always connected to nomad space, whereas it conjugates with sedentary space. On the side of the nomadic assemblages and war machines, it is a kind of rhizome, with its gaps, detours, subterranean passages, stems, openings, traits, holes, etc. On the other side, the sedentary assemblages and State apparatuses effect a capture of the phylum, put the traits of expression into a form or a code, make the holes resonate together, plug the lines of flight, subordinate the technological operation to the work model, impose upon the connections a whole regime of arborescent conjunctions.

While thus far I have suggested that Global Village Basketball constitutes a smooth space in contrast to the striated space of formal basketball governance, I have wondered several times to myself if in fact this project doesn't simply act as part of the apparatus of capture by a sporting Empire. Does the concept of "holey space" offer a way out of this conundrum? Doesn't GVB actually connect elements of the smooth (passages through cyberspace, non-choreographed performing bodies) with elements of the striated (fixed time frame, work model of score to unite all athletes)?

Unfortunately, in their discussion of space Deleuze and Guattari spend most of their efforts on the opposition between the smooth and the striated. While they acknowledge that these exist in admixture with one another, they don't discuss at any length how one changes to the other over time, or develop the idea of holey space to any great extent. But I will have to at least consider the possibility of GVB and holey space as facilitators of both connections and conjunctions in a sporting context.