Yes, the Opening Ceremonies were perhaps one of the most elaborately crafted exercises in narrative and mass consumption ever constructed, a logistics of perception meticulously designed to captivate each member of the worldwide audience: the Four Great Inventions and Parade of Nations as tele-colonial act. But this does not, nor cannot, tell the whole story.

Generally speaking, one's options within Beijing on 08.08.08 were to either watch on television in the privacy of one's own home alone or with a handful of family and friends; watch at one of the state-controlled, corporate-sponsored public viewing areas; or not watch at all. The outdoor quasi-public viewing area in the hutong with HomeShop provided an alternative to these options. One could say that it was simply a scaled-down version of one of the public viewing areas scattered around the city, but this misses the subtle nuances of difference.

Once the neighbours realized what was unfolding, it seemed to me that the opening ceremonies at HomeShop became a very collaborative DIY event. So many people wanted to contribute, whether it was in buying beer for the party, sharing marinated peanuts brought from home, serving watermelon and tidying up afterwards, or performing a very local history of the hutong (the fool!). And I would argue that the subsequent events hosted by HomeShop during its 17 days wouldn't have had the same traction with the neighbours — either in explicit participation or as a tacit acceptance of outsiders occupying local space — were it not for that initial encounter with an optics of familiarity (television) coupled with a haptic and supple molecular form that was not too small (isolated in living room) nor too large (the mass of the public viewing area).

(Certainly the dynamism of the Loser's Party and the wii would like to play // we don't have tickets event would have been drastically different in that case.)

At the same time the scale of the HomeShop public viewing cannot be disconnected from the fact that this was one of the most-watched television broadcasts in human history and hence the desire to be in the hutong to begin with. So while it is evident that the intimate nature of HomeShop's public viewing served as a catalyst for what might be described as a temporary autonomous zone, there is a need to interrogate this micropolitical space on a sliding spatiotemporal scale from global to local — not smaller or larger, but both/and — or at least read it stereoscopically as an experience of here and now.

(a work-in-process between elaine w. ho and sean smith towards "17 days in beijing: screen of consciousness on the micropolitical," a text for public issue 40)

(proposal for video installation: a co-emergent project of the department of biological flow)

[18/04/2009 7:15:57 PM] sportsbabel says: decouple camera from eye +
[18/04/2009 7:16:02 PM] sportsbabel says: gait surfing +
[18/04/2009 7:16:10 PM] sportsbabel says: vitruvian man +
[18/04/2009 7:16:16 PM] sportsbabel says: cubo-futurism +
[18/04/2009 7:16:29 PM] sportsbabel says: matrixial borderspace =

paul virilio, la rochelle lectures, april 2009: "duchamp's nude descending a staircase is not a body, but the trajectory of a decomposition of a body descending a staircase, that is, parts of a body in acceleration."

camera+tripod: static
camera+dolly: equals camera+vehicle (see virilio's art of the motor)
camera+human.pov: identification with the moving human subject; a particular cinematographic technique that gives the recumbent body of audience member a sense of the uncanny at being jolted into jerky motion relative to the smoothness of the other two forms of perception; but this is still an association and identification with the eye

biomechanics (muybridge, marey, etc.) function by photographing the joints/body parts in motion

sylvère lotringer: "the cinema is war pursued by other means."

paul virilio: "it's not by chance that the movie camera was preceded by marey's chrono-photographic rifle and the gatling gun, which was itself inspired by the colt revolver" (Pure War, p. 84).

can we not have these joints/body parts in motion see?

"we are left with a conundrum: how to communicate the existence of embodied surfing potential in its myriad forms and work towards realizing such a new perhaps-radical politics without documenting the performance and contributing to a regressive politics of representation, fear and desire? this conundrum has lurked in the shadows for centuries, embedded in what deleuze and guattari refer to as the hydraulics of nomad science. one cannot document the act of surfing, the poiesis of being-in-body and becoming. like secret whispers passed throughout history from breath to ear, then, one can only document the wave."