language, flows, synergy

On August 12 sportsBabel visited the HomeShop series one: GAMES 2008 critical art space for an interview with project creator and host Elaine Ho. An artist and designer living in Beijing and working throughout the network, Elaine is theoretically interested in public and private space as it intersects with issues of bodies and human subjects, identities, communities, politics and a changing China. These interests continually inform her aesthetic practices in art and design, which in turn flow back and provide her new opportunities for critical engagement at the level of the lived everyday.

Given our varied cultural histories and fragmented identities, our mutual theoretical interests, and our different backgrounds in sport and aesthetics, a very nice synergy developed between the two of us during the interview that allowed me to articulate and clarify in language many ideas which have been gestating for some time at the level of affect and thought and which will prove fruitful as they flow back into my own critical engagements. Our conversation was challenging yet rewarding and only scratched the surface of possibility for any future encounter.

The interview in its entirety — 13?: sports, panhapticism, geopolitics — may be found at Elaine's HomeShop project web site.
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track listing

introduction, sport and media | 7'49

blogging | 16'30

singularity | 10'02

semiotic | 9'17

panoptic and panhaptic | 21'13

control, gaps, noises, cracks | 8'04

homeshop | 18'11

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The HomeShop Games 2008 project is the first in a series of community-based investigations of art practices, Beijing, networked spaces and the home. The space is open daily by appointment throughout the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.