When a basketball player dives headlong out of bounds to save a ball and runs face-first into the crowd occupying the courtside seats, one begins to have an embodied metaphor for the violence done to the sporting subject by the sideline and its enclosure.
"All in all you're just another brick in the wall." — Pink Floyd
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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.
Global Village Basketball is an internationally-networked game of pickup basketball that first took place on June 10, 2009. It is also part of a doctoral project by Sean Smith on networked sport and community politics.
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
sportsBabel, a confusion of voices spoken by Sean Smith, is created using WordPress. Love and respect are due to Blogger, which helped me get my start in blogging.
September 16th, 2009
[...] too, is a field of potential that is induced by the opposing goals at either end of the rectangular enclosure. But basketball, in a fashion far more pronounced than in soccer, can be played in more informal [...]