Moebius, Style and the Double Strip Flip
Style exists at the flip of the moebius strip.
It is not a deliberate attempt to cheat, per se, but it is greater than the technical proficiency required to execute the skills of the sport. If it is too much of a variation from the technically proficient or encoded rules, then the referee calls an infraction and new rules are created or perhaps old ones modified (cf. Massumi).
Now imagine that the transludic flip of this moebius strip intersects (or is braided) with the flip of another one, which we shall understand as the dual surface of surveillance and spectacle.
Style belongs to both domains (or sets?): not only does it mediate between playing by the rules and cheating, but it is also the switch point at which the technical apparatus facilitating the surveillant gaze becomes the engine of sign value for the set of social relations that constitutes the athletic spectacle.
(This relationship is obscured insofar as the production of surveillance becomes increasingly visible in the contemporary age while the production of spectacle becomes increasingly invisible.)
In other words, it is style (or virtuosity?) that has been appropriated from the common good and pressed into the service of capital, but it is perhaps style — and its complex emergence from the relational — that offers the possibility for the common to return, however temporarily.
Global Village Basketball is an 
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.
May 28th, 2009
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September 21st, 2009
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October 6th, 2009
[...] at the ostensible boundaries of play. Brian Massumi refers to this threshold phenomenon as the style that generates the evolution of the sport. Homo Transludens, then, may be considered as "the [...]
December 7th, 2009
[...] the national angst and sense of injustice borne by the supporters of the Republic of Ireland when a handball-abetted pass by France's Thierry Henry to William Gallas for the deciding goal — spotted by the [...]
February 14th, 2010
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