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.