Motion capture. Captured motion.

It is no coincidence that in his essay "Notes on Gesture" Giorgio Agamben only provides the reader one concrete exemplar of what actually constitutes a gesture, and that is gait. Recall that Muybridge and Marey became godfathers of not only the art of cinema but also the science of biomechanics, the relation becoming more apparent over the course of the twentieth century insofar as both serve to capture motion. Or, more specifically, as they both serve to capture gesture: walking and gait have become as important to the processes of consumption as they have to those of production.

It is gait that provided the basis for some of Muybridge and Marey's early cinematic works, but is also the foundational human movement that has driven most innovations in biomechanical measurement during the past century, from stroboscopic photography to force plate analysis to high-speed videography. As Francesco Careri suggests, walking is the "first aesthetic act" of humans in that it assumes a "symbolic form" shaping our very being in the world and our relationships to landscape and architecture. Gait is integral to this symbolic form and thus integral to our built environment both real and virtual. While Careri argues convincingly that the built environment of humans emerges from nomadic walking peoples, eventually it comes to mark the character of the sedentary city in both material and immaterial fashion: the polis and the walking subject enter biunivocal relations of naming the other. Walking is not simply an aesthetic act, then, but a political one as well.

Gabriel Orozco
digitally-manipulated photographic print

And while Agamben devotes his attention to cinema for the remainder of the essay, perhaps we ought to follow the twin genealogies created by Muybridge and Marey to consider parallel developments in biomechanics as well. Extending an argument from Deleuze's book on cinema, Agamben suggests that "the element of cinema is gesture and not image." If Agamben and Deleuze are correct, then the reason gesture has been obscured in cinematic analysis appears to be simple, as it is literally a matter of appearances. Until recently, cinematic scenes were always shot from a single perspective at a time, from a single camera, and many of these single shots (perhaps from different cameras) were edited together to form a final filmic image — with the audience member, as Benjamin points out, assuming the position of the camera and the gaze of the director.

With this flattening of the perspectival gaze to the two-dimensional surface it appears that the image constitutes the foundational element of cinema, but this is due to the technical limitations of the input device rather than to any truth of the form itself — if we can consider "cinema" to be an assemblage of bodies and technologies that produces the final filmic image. Given such an input, one can never see all sides of a volume from a single point in Euclidean space — and gesture is volumetric.

What technical vision wants is to see the subject from all directions at once — in other words, to become omnidirectional or omnipresent (and here we can explain the "replacement" for an idea of God, in a technocratic sense of becoming-secular). Following Agamben and Deleuze, this is because technical vision wants to represent gesture rather than simple image.

The goal of omnidirectionality had been accomplished to some degree in biomechanics with motion capture technology, an apparatus that features multiple simultaneous camera angles synthesized together to identify the position of markers located on key anthropometric sites of the body. In doing so, it became possible to create volumetric models of gesture for the purposes of measurement, analysis and optimization.

But omnidirectionality has truly taken off with videogames, which took the practical fruits of biomechanic research and made them profitable for the industry of integrated spectacle. Financial gain may now accrue by capturing and expropriating the gestures of athletes and actors to create identity-constructs that are tried on like well-made Armani suits. While playing these games the user reduces one's own gestures to a programmed and nearly-pure electromagnetic impulse almost unrecognizable in comparison to those movements taking place on the screen.

And since it is the integrated spectacle we are describing it is no surprise that innovations in the videogame medium were fedbackforward into cinema, as with the bullet time effects in The Matrix. It is perhaps most impressive, then, that Deleuze recognized cinema's gestural character without ever having seen Trinity levitate to raise holy hell on two units of simulated police.

Building upon the work of Varro and Aristotle, the central thesis of Giorgio Agamben's essay "Notes on Gesture" is that gesture — a means without an end — stands separate from production or poiesis (a means to an end) and action or praxis (an end without a means), and in the process opens a new dimension of the political. This is no trivial observation for Agamben: "means without end" serves as the title of the book in which the essay appears, both in its English translation and the original Italian ("mezzi senza fine"). Clearly this idea of the "being-in-language" that is gesture is somewhere near the crux of his political thought.

Nothing is more misleading for an understanding of gesture, therefore, than representing, on the one hand, a sphere of means as addressing a goal (for example, marching seen as a means of moving the body from point A to point B) and, on the other hand, a separate and superior sphere of gesture as a movement that has its end in itself (for example, dance seen as an aesthetic dimension). Finality without means is just as alienating as mediality that has meaning only with respect to an end. If dance is gesture, it is so, rather, because it is nothing more than the endurance and the exhibition of the media character of corporal movements. The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such (p.58, emphasis in original).

It behooves us to consider Agamben's thesis in resonance with Paolo Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude. In the second day of the seminar that constitutes the basis of the book, Virno outlines a similar triad that informs his potential politics: labour, action and intellect.

Let us consider carefully what defines the activity of virtuosos, of performing artists. First of all, theirs is an activity which finds its own fulfillment (that is, its own purpose) in itself, without objectifying itself into an end product, without settling into a "finished product," or into an object which would survive the performance. Secondly, it is an activity which requires the presence of others, which exists only in the presence of an audience (p.52, emphasis in original).

The two analyses, which do not refer to each other in any way (Agamben's original appeared in 1996, while Virno's seminar took place in 2001), are in fact so remarkably similar that I feel a need to address the following questions in the context of Global Village Basketball and any project of sporting multitude:

1. how does gesture relate to intellect?
2. how does Virno's hybridization of labour and political action in the post-fordist age complicate Agamben's analysis?
3. how do we locate virtuosity relative to the sphere of gesture?
4. is Virno's language and virtuosity of the speaker actually commensurate with Agamben's pure mediality and being-in-language of gesture?
5. can networked pickup basketball realize both Agamben's and Virno's politics insofar as the emergence of a sporting multitude is concerned?

(a work-in-process between elaine w. ho and sean smith towards "unlayering the relational: microaesthetics and micropolitics," a text for the mediamodes art and technology conference in new york)

caminhando com lygia

flypen:
" … has a built-in camera next to the writing tip. when you write, the camera sees tiny dots on the [special] paper, which are printed with reflective ink in a very subtle pattern. the camera takes a series of fast snapshots of the dots, reads the pattern, and finds the action assigned to those dots."

yasunao tone:
"to fight with smart machines you have to be very primitive."

keywords:
lygia clark, walking, striated space, camera, moebius, intersubjectivity, bodies, cut, plastic surgery

On Performing the University of Disaster (an interlude)

If you think the Spy should accept the mission, click here.
If you think the Spy should ignore the Colonel, click here.

priscilla monge
untitled
2006
outdoor installation

Continuing our translation of Massumi's soccer ball to sportsbabel's basketball with a brief discussion of the space of play and how it conditions the field of emergence before any retrospective coding by official rules.

So what is the condition? Quite simply, a field. No field, no play, and the rules lose their power. The field is what is common to the proto-game and the formalized game, as well as to informal versions of the game coexisting with the official game and any subsequent evolution of it. The field-condition that is common to every variation is unformalized but not unorganized. It is minimally organized as a polarization. The field is polarized by two attractors: the goals. All movement in the game will take place between the poles and will tend toward one or the other. They are physical limits. The play stops when the ball misses or hits the goal. The goals do not exist for the play except tendentially, as inducers of directional movement of which they mark the outside limits (winning or losing). The goals polarize the space between them. The field of play is an in-between of charged movement. It is more fundamentally a field of potential than a substantial thing, or object. As things, the goals are signs for the polar attraction that is the motor of the game. They function to induce the play. The literal field, the ground with grass stretching between the goals, is also an inductive limit-sign rather than a ground in any foundational sense. The play in itself is groundless and limitless, taking place above the ground-limit and between the goal-limits (Parables for the Virtual, p.72).

Here I would like to emphasize Massumi's point about play taking place above the ground-limit, for it is important not to allow his analysis (or our understanding of it) to privilege a planar perspective of the field of potential. Some time ago I mentioned how a shift in the dimensions and trajectories of certain sports consequently shifted the strategies used to excel in competition and hence the types of athletic bodies that were desirable for competition purposes.

Perhaps in no sport was this more true than in basketball, whose goals that charged the field of ludic potential are located ten feet off the ground, by dint of James Naismith's balcony-affixed peach baskets over a century ago. As arguably one of the first modern sports to be invented wholly indoors, basketball was from the outset intimately bound to the built architectural environment in which it emerged.

For the longest time the primary skill required for success in basketball was a certain marksmanship that allowed one to quickly determine trajectories and shoot the ball into the basket. Height was certainly favoured, but only insofar as it allowed those shot trajectories (and corresponding rebounds of missed attempts) to be shorter and more precise.

Dunking, however, changed the sport forever. While a genealogy of the dunk as a particularly Afrocentric form of cultural expression needs to be accounted for here, suffice it to say in the meantime that while it originally favoured the extremely tall player the athletic skill set changed to favour the quick, explosive leaper: Earl "The Goat" Manigault, Connie "The Hawk" Hawkins, and Herman "The Helicopter" Knowings. Julius Erving, Dominique Wilkins, Michael Jordan, and Vince Carter. James White, Justin Darlington, and Guy DePuy, to name but a few of these artists.

With dunking, the athletic body itself assumed a ballistic trajectory in order to stuff the ball into the goal both efficiently and emphatically. Any understanding of the dunk as an expressive art form in its own right must acknowledge this a priori corporeal basis of the athletic agent. Afrofuturism?

Put two teams on a grassy field with goals at either end and you have an immediate, palpable tension. The attraction of which the goals and ground are inductive signs is invisible and nonsubstantial: it is a tensile force-field activated by the presence of bodies within the signed limits. The polarity of the goals defines every point in the field and every movement on the field in terms of force — specifically, as the potential motion of the ball and of the teams toward the goal. When the ball nears a goal, the play reaches a pitch of intensity. Every gesture of the players is supercharged toward scoring a goal or toward repelling one. The ball is charged to the highest degree with potential movement toward the goal, by its position on the field, by the collective tending of the team homing in for a score. The slightest slip or miscalculation will depotentialize that movement. When that happens, a release of tension as palpable as its earlier build-up undulates across the field (Parables for the Virtual, p.72).

The "field" of basketball is the court, or at least that space of play in the proto-game that may be deemed a court. It, 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 variations on a single goal or basket (or with three goals for that matter).

This does not negate Massumi's point about the inductive potential of the polarized goals to catalyze the field of play, but rather underscores its very importance: when opponents play pickup basketball on a single basket, they are able to do so precisely because the second basket is imagined to exist for both offensive and defensive players alike.

And once one can imagine the existence of a second basket, it becomes less of a stretch to further imagine the existence of baskets elsewhere around the world.

In the age of the integrated spectacle (cf. Agamben), few of the static two-dimensional images that are presented to us in the course of everyday life — magazine ads, billboards, posters, direct mailings, and the like — are in fact truly depthless artefacts. Rather, they are the result of careful processes in which part-objects have been layered on top of one another, grouped together, and transformed in various ways before being flattened out to the final "static" image.

Generally speaking, these part-objects may be either textual elements or other image elements, that is, the fundamental building blocks of Flusser's line and surface thinking. The graphic design software that facilitates the creation of this final flattened image retains within the file all of the meta-information about each of these part-objects in terms of position, understood as the x-y coordinates of grid plane and the z-index of layer — in other words, the file contains the relations that existed between each part-object before flattening took place.

But a skilled and experienced designer doesn't need the original file to understand the relations that created the final image. Simply by assessing the visual outcome in the context of embodied memory, one is able to unlayer and reconstitute that which has been usurped of its depth in its rendering-spectacular.

The complexity of the spectacular apparatus increases as we move from the processed image into the realm of cinema and television and literally introduce motion to the process. Chion identifies new building blocks that are added to the image and text within the two-dimensional frame, most importantly the audio elements of speech and field sound captured during recording, and the music and sound effects added in post-production. To the moving image we also add the graphic overlay, a visual element that may be static or animated and which is visually distinct from the images that have been captured by the camera during filming. These overlays are increasingly connected to external (relational) databases in the specific example of television, as with statistics during a sports broadcast or with the latest quotes on a news channel stock market ticker.

Nonetheless, the experienced director or video editor may similarly be able to quickly apprehend after the fact the layers and corresponding relations that produced the final cinematic outcome. In doing so, we may already understand that the layer is not a two-dimensional phenomenon, as Chion's inclusion of audio and acoustic space illustrates.

Now consider those works that find smooth passage through categorical barriers identified variously as interventions, conceptual pieces, participation-oriented performances or community-based art projects. Three such examples, different though interrelated, might include Global Village Basketball, HomeShop, and wii would like to play // we don't have tickets. While these works were "framed" with more or less well-defined spatiotemporal parameters, they are most definitely of the realm of the volumetric and hence introduce new complexities to the apparatus.

Of course, with such events there is no "file" to which we have recourse for determining the layers and relations between the part-subjects that comprised their contextual fabric. As Massumi points out, they are ontogenetic. But, as with the processed static and moving video images described earlier, is it possible to unlayer the volumetric interactions of the intervention after the fact? Can we assess the audiovisual outcomes in the context of embodied memory and perhaps in the process identify new building blocks for the becoming-social each work facilitated, such as gesture, tango, translation, risk and exchange?

(a work-in-process between elaine w. ho and sean smith towards "unlayering the relational: microaesthetics and micropolitics," a text for the mediamodes art and technology conference in new york)

endurance versus speed

"one cannot simply write about prosthesis when one is automatically, just by virtue of writing, writing prosthesis, entering into prosthetic relations, being prosthetic." — david wills, prosthesis, p.30

"two bodies: compositions — actual, virtual, organic, prosthetic. as we move with them, remember: there are always at least two, even when you perceive one, connected." — erin manning, relationscapes: movement, art, philosophy, p.14

"politics is the sphere of pure means, that is, of the absolute and complete gesturality of human beings" — giorgio agamben, notes on politics, p.60

jeremy fernando ft. lali puna (sb rmx)

On 1 September 2009, the Control and Disciplinary Body of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) slapped a 2-match ban on Eduardo Alves da Silva of Arsenal FC, for "deceiving the referee" during the UEFA Champions League play-off second leg match on August 26 against Celtic FC. Eduardo was accused of going down in the penalty box, despite there having been no apparent contact with Celtic goalkeeper Artur Boruc: referee Manuel Mejuto Gonzalez awarded the penalty, which was subsequently converted by Eduardo himself.

Those who condemn Eduardo usually base it around the notion that diving goes against the 'spirit of the game', and that UEFA is taking a step in the right direction by attempting to stamp it out. His defenders claim that he is being scape-goated; he is hardly the first to have taken a dive, and surely will not be the last.

All of them have of course missed the point completely.

Games are rules-based situations, and are teleological by definition. In football, the aim is to score more goals than your opponent, within the boundaries set by the rules of the game. A situation can only have 'spirit' if it does not have a pre-determined goal; that would be the domain of an art-form. The moment it enters the domain of a game, with its specific end-point, it is no longer an expression of the potential movement of the spirit: we have seen this happen to many art-forms when they attempt to translate themselves into sports (a few instances of this include martial arts such as Judo, Tae-Kwon-Do, and Brazilian Jujitsu). Whether Eduardo is the very first to take a dive or not is irrelevant; if he was deemed to have broken the rules by the referee, he has. What is equally irrelevant is whether he has actually done so or not.

Perhaps the fact that the interpretation of rules — which are the hinge that all games revolve around — lies solely in the hands of the referee might give us a clue to why 'diving' has become such a major point of discussion in football. If the referee is interpreting the rules in a situation, this suggests that (s)he is always already caught in the tension between the universal (the rules as such) and the particular (the singular interpretation of those said rules). The problem lies in the translation of the rules — which must apply to everyone, and in all situations — into a singular situation, with its specific contexts, environment, and such. In other words, the referee is not interpreting the rules in a hermeneutical sense (interpreting what the letter of the rules mean), nor even a phenomenological sense (which still requires a correspondence between the situation and a pre-conceived code), but more radically, each time the referee blows the whistle, (s)he is writing those very rules themselves. Each time (s)he lays down the rules of the game becomes the undoing of those very same rules.

And each time a player dives, we have the unique situation where (s)he is strictly speaking not breaking any of the rules (after all, there is nothing in football that says you can't decide to fall down in the middle of the game), but at the same time, what has happened is that the player has foregrounded the fact that the referee is precisely the rule(s) of the game. This is precisely why 'diving' is frowned upon: it highlights the fact that there really is no basis to these very rules; they are completely arbitrary. This is the lesson of The Emperor's New Clothes: the shock and horror of the crowd was not in the fact that the little child pointed out that the Emperor was naked (who didn't already know that), but in foregrounding of the absurdity of the situation itself (where he is only the Emperor because everyone deems him to be so; and in this case the absurdity is doubled as he was not even carrying the signs of an Emperor, that is the crown and the sceptre). This child was told to be quiet precisely because what was highlighted was the fact that the people were making themselves subservient in the face of absolute lack of evidence that the man standing in front of them was the Emperor. Each time a player dives, what is highlighted to the crowd is that they are watching a game that really has nothing to do with them: for without a common set of rules, there really are no boundaries to the game, and by extension no possible understanding of the game. Perhaps this is why those that are most vitriolic against diving are football commentators: each dive only reminds us that they really have no idea what they are talking about, and in fact have jobs based on absolutely nothing.

We see this desperate attempt to re-inscribe simulation back into the auspices of 'reality' not only in sport, but in the advertising industry as well. Kevin Swanepoel, President of the One Club, which runs the One Show advertising awards, recently announced that from 2010, any award submission that is deemed to be a 'scam ad' (that is, done solely to win awards, and are not linked to any 'real' client, or 'real' advertisement) will result in a 5-year ban from competition.

Clearly it is not the honesty, or integrity, of advertisements or adverting agencies, that is being chastised here: that would just be too ironic. A more important thing is at stake: that of the reality principle itself. For what 'scam ads' do is foreground the fact that the best work at agencies happen for these 'scams', rather than for the client, the very same client that is paying for their work and by extension their wages. Hence what the 'scam ads' highlight is the fact that creatives write ads for the clients, but only in order to sustain what really interests them, the awards themselves. And more importantly than that, the supposed target audience for the work they are paid to do — the end consumer — isn't even a part of the consideration. And this is the very secret that must be protected: for if the end consumer stops looking at ads, not only do the clients close down, but advertising and the entire advertising industry is made redundant.

SpY
ramp
urban furniture installation

Arsene Wenger, the manager of Arsenal FC, is absolutely correct when he called it a "witch hunt," for what is at stake is the secret the very game of football requires — that the rules apply to everyone fairly. UEFA have clearly learnt from Wes Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street: in order to kill Freddy Krueger, you have to ignore the fact that he is a figment of your imagination, but instead take him on his own terms (the dreamscape) and kill him there. Therefore, it does not matter if Eduardo dived or not, nor does it matter that the referee (who is the arbiter of the rules) deemed that it was a penalty; the imposition of the ban allows UEFA to maintain the illusion that the rules are certain — that they are above and beyond any situation and interpretation. Hence the only response is to be as arbitrary as the rules are with the punishment — a 2-match ban in retrospect, after initially toying with a potential 6-match ban (it could have been 20 or 5; it would make absolutely no difference).

On 1 September, 2009, UEFA sacrificed Eduardo at the stake, to save football itself.

* * *

Jeremy Fernando is the Jean Baudrillard Fellow at the European Graduate School. He works at the intersections of literature, philosophy, and the media, and is the author of Reflections on (T)error, and two forthcoming books entitled Reading Blindly, and The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death. He is also a Research Fellow at the Centre of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

proposition: those moments in which one rides another's wake during a gait surfing run constitute a gesture in which the former's perspectival gaze and the latter's kino-gait overlap and fold within a movement-experience of the flesh. one simultaneously perceives a wave opening up and the being-in-wave of the other as it opens.

[11:05:23 AM] sportsbabel says (sb rmx):

"Kino-gait is relational in that it allows one to completely enter the negative space that is created by the other's body."

"Kino-gait is relational in that it allows one to completely enter the negative space that is created by the other's body in passage."

"Kino-gait is relational in that it allows one to navigate the moebius flip between vision and gesture, to completely enter the negative space that is created by the other's body in passage."

{Completely?}

(in a technical-hypothetical sense, yes, but in a deeper ontogenetic sense, probably not. consider this more carefully.)

"There can never be a complete closure between the one and the other, however, in assuming gesture through kino-gait. The incipience of a movement (cf. Massumi, Manning) will always precede some form of material lag time (nerve conductivity, electromagnetic interface, state censorship) that precludes the possibility for the subject of the gesture to ever be fully captured."

{Captured? Expressed? Described?}

(captured, to follow earlier work on docile bodies and docile identities, when the discipline-prison becomes the discipline-avatar in the societies of control.)

[11:29:32 AM]

* * *

(thanks to drox and switch for gift of voice, to linds for kino-gift.)

"What characterizes the sage, according to Zhuangzi, is the fact that his breathing is "deep-deep." Not only does it embody harmonious regulation in its alternation, but, moreover, the intensive implied by the repetition of the word tells us that respiration must extend throughout the physical being to the very extremities: 'The authentic man breathes from his heels,' in other words, to his foundations; the common man breathes only 'from his throat.'" — François Jullien, Vital Nourishment

???? jingshan park,
beijing, china
august 2008