Window display of bridal fashion store
with war figurines advancing on wedding dress in battle formation (multiple views)
Valencia, Spain
July 2007

Albert Einstein’s hypothesis of three imminent bombs—nuclear, information, population—is a motif that has woven its way insistently into Paul Virilio’s analysis of contemporary society and his war model of urban change. It is an astute conceptual choice for Virilio since it was in the twentieth century that the implications of light speed and the theory of relativity continually unfolded to reshape social relations from the local community level to that of global geopolitics, punctuated most resoundingly by the twin detonations of Little Boy and Fat Man in 1945, and those of the Twin Towers in 2001.

That said, the seductiveness of the bomb as motif proves problematic at times since Virilio himself weaves between the traditional understanding of a weapon and his true interest, which is the idea of bomb as metaphor for the accident that is located within the substance of any technology. Semantically fusing the weapon with the accident obscures those aspects of intent and agency required to instrumentalize properties of the latter for creating and detonating a bomb of the former type.

The relationship between war machines and accidents is complicated as the question of property enters the discussion, for in the post-Fordist regime we find that all types of information have been rendered to the property form. Here is the point at which Virilio's genetic bomb begins to develop—not because of the expressly militaristic imperative as before with the Manhattan Project and ARPAnet, but because of the profit potential that exists in owning the language of living things and creating flesh products based on that knowledge. This should not be understood as a recourse to dialectical materialism but rather as an exploration of how the trialectic relationship between weapon, accident and property form may suggest new lines of inquiry to the questions that Virilio poses.

Window display of bridal fashion store (detail)
Valencia, Spain
July 2007

Little Boy to Fat Man might also be understood as the consumption trajectory of Western sport masculinity, from the promising young athlete to the just past prime spectator of television. In this trajectory the dynamics of the libidinal yield to the stasis of the lipidinal as the nervous system accelerates faster than what is capable by mere flesh and bone. Dromology, of course, has its root in the Greek word dromos, for race or running, that most fundamental of sporting cultures. And whether we are discussing the Olympian sort with its citius, altius, fortius (…copiosus) or the commodified professional sort of capitalist accumulation, sporting cultures are at their core grounded in moving bodies which have been subject throughout their history to forces of acceleration. They might thus play a role in helping us understand a logic and politics of speed, how speed is created, how it is administered, and the accident that lies within.

Perhaps none of Virilio's many contributions to critical thought are so visceral as the detonation of this philosophical bomb of bombs. As such, they beg a visceral response. With that in mind, consider the following an attempt to catalogue an archaeology of the stereoscopic present—a present in which we simultaneously exist in the corporeality of the everyday with its sensuality, affect and duration, as well as the global real-time of the network in which light speed has telescoped all past and future into a persistent now. And if the notion of a catalogue seems far too linear for the age of networked optoelectronics, then instead consider the following a form of speed writing to match that accelerating shockwave which Virilio has exploded all around us.

Introduction to the forthcoming essay:
"La Bombe Philosophique: An Archaeology of the Stereoscopic Present (Or, Sporting Through the Shrapnel)"

When a stadium is replicated from its material state to that of the immaterial digital game environment an interesting change occurs. Those structural elements of the stadium that are necessary to the overall architectural form, both public (bathrooms, concourses) and private (storage rooms, HVAC systems), are eliminated from the ludic experience of the digital space. However, the physics that each of these elements provides to the holism of its engineering are still respected as far as the perspective of the gamer is concerned, though they are represented in scalable vector and polygonal mathematics rather than as physical load-bearing conduits for produced force. The floor does not sink towards a particular corner, nor do cracks appear in the ceiling. Though the degrees of freedom for the user have been substantially constrained, in other words, virtual sports spaces continue to function as if the entire stadium still existed.

minutes after the fact, with only the lurching treadmarks of the motorized medical cart left to scar the otherwise rectilinear striations of the gridiron pitch, one remains amazed at how the spectacle industry has developed protocol for neurological devastation to the collective football flesh …

The urban gait surfer locates traces of itself throughout the archives of the city and the annals of its moving bodies. This city is understood as a history of structures and flows, each interplaying with the other, constraining the possibilities of the other, and creating the other anew. But these are by definition only partial traces, gratuitous appropriations from an ever-changing trajectory of nomadism (the flâneur, the psychogeographer, the surfer, the street skater, the parkour athlete) to situate a particular social, cultural and political moment, as the twisted plaits of a braid form a beautiful (and communicative) knot in a macramé pattern before separating to become elsewhere and when.

In The Spirit of Terrorism, Baudrillard wonders, following 9/11, what architectural form is worthy of being annihilated today? In considering the question we must first acknowledge that any potentially targeted architectural object must carve out a unique form in both space and time. That a building should be distinctive enough in its spatial form and purpose is obvious, but an element of duration is also required for that object to have accumulated the requisite symbolic capital necessary to achieve a critical semiotic yield. This is what makes the case of the World Trade Center particularly interesting: in only three decades, the twin towers were able to absorb all of the symbolism of an American capitalism that had rapidly become multinational, with ambitions of radiating globally. Put differently, the light-speed of Hollywood and the spectacle-making industry had accelerated the process of forging duration.

From the forthcoming essay:
"La Bombe Philosophique: An Archaeology of the Stereoscopic Present (Or, Sorting Through the Shrapnel)"

The light-speed of the nuclear blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki forces a recalibration of other speeds as well. The succeeding Cold War witnessed one such recalibration in the animal speed of the moving body: while proxy wars were fought in the jungles of the underdeveloped world, they were contested in the sporting arenas of the overdeveloped world as well. East versus West sporting competition launched a total rationalization of the athletic body as object of science that could be engineered for the optimal pursuit of speed in the name of ideology. The fallout from this proxy sporting war was most notably witnessed with the national teams of East Germany, which implemented programs of steroid use to increase speed and power for both its male and female athletes, resulting in short-term athletic success at the expense of substantial physical deformities later in life. From state-sponsored subhumanization to state-sponsored superhumanization and its mutant consequences in a matter of three decades, the jackboot march of progress carried on.

From the forthcoming essay:
"La Bombe Philosophique: An Archaeology of the Stereoscopic Present (Or, Sorting Through the Shrapnel)"

It used to be of greater consequence whether an individual was located in front of the camera (participant) or in front of the screen (spectator), but that holds less true today. When considering contemporary aesthetics and politics, camera and screen no longer provide distinct or mutually exclusive subject positions, bound up as they are in the moebius strip of surveillance and spectacle, or the moebius strip of control. As Arendt and Virilio would suggest, the substance of technological progress also contains the catastrophe of the accident — and the erosion of democratic principles may be witnessed as the accident of camera+screen.

ESPN, the "Worldwide Leader in Sports," uses "never before seen" surveillance camera footage for an Outside the Lines segment alleging the involvement of Adam "Pacman" Jones' entourage in an Atlanta nightclub shooting June 18, 2007. Jones was not charged by police. In this snapshot of Jones' biography on Wikipedia, 24 out of 54 references were from ESPN.com.

Hollywood was the first great project of the industrialization of information compression, folding entire buildings and cities into a few square miles of gated Los Angeles suburb. Notably, its nine massive hillside letters were cleverly positioned just out of reach of the other three great American landmarks destroyed on September 11, 2001. Military, political and economic symbols were all struck that day (in material or discursive form), though it was the entertainment symbol and all it represented at the frontier of westward expansion that gave the semiotic raison d'etre for their destruction in the first place. From expansion to compression — not explosion to implosion — for if there is an information bomb of the nuclear sort it is not only because the vectors of transmission have enveloped the earth in unprecedented fashion, but also because the compressed density of information is such that explosiveness-in-potential trembles deep within.

From the forthcoming essay:
"La Bombe Philosophique: An Archaeology of the Stereoscopic Present (Or, Sorting Through the Shrapnel)"

Hardware Rhizome (detail)
created by purple
2008

"The storage of information may be as valuable as its transmission, and the archive is a vector through time just as telesthesia is a vector through space. The whole potential of space and time becomes the object of the vectoral class." — McKenzie Wark, The Hacker Manifesto, #318

I have long admired this particular quote from Wark, but have been thinking a little bit more about it recently, and just about the same time this Wark-inspired artwork from purple comes to me through the wires. Namely, I am wondering about the idea that the whole potential of space and time become the object, or goal as it were, of the vectoral class.

It seems to me that capitalism (which yields to vectoralism in Wark's framework) has always been a system of the human body — that is, it has always been a system of relations that arranges, manages and optimizes the production, distribution and consumption of resources by influencing or constraining the human at the level of the body. That this statement is anthropocentric or speciesist is precisely the point: it wasn't the birds, bees or flowers that created the relations of capitalist exploitation.

As we move into the era of vectoralism or information capitalism, things remain largely the same, though the stakes have gotten much higher. Today, it is the total exo- and endocolonization (cf. Virilio) of the human body that is truly the object of the vectoral class. Relations of space, time, orga or mecha are but the vehicles through which these are achieved.

With regard to the cognitive and social development of their children during the non-school (ie. "non-work") time of leisure, parents are rethinking their chosen strategies for success. Packing too many activities into a demanding timetable regimen is perceived to have negative effects on child, parents and total family unit, and hence the beginning of a shift from the overscheduled to the underscheduled.

Organized sport and fitness demands such a timetable, however, mostly due to scarcity — a scarcity of playing facilities, a scarcity of players of similar skill level at any particular moment, etc. Hence, the timetable ensured that there would be enough of a critical mass at a particular space and time to stage an event.

Moving to the unscheduled does not necessarily imply a return to the romanticism of free play, however.

What happens when we move to the online sport and fitness universes of Playstation Home, Xbox Live, EA Sports, (and soon) Wii Fit? Is the aforementioned local scarcity eliminated by the global decentralized mass of anytime-available "dividual" users and rapidly replicating server farms, such that the strict barriers of the timetable begin to dissolve? And what happens to the athletic body in the process?