An aging basketball player (or perhaps a dancer) attempts to execute a skill on the court made countless times in the past. Perhaps a feint with the dribble in hand, perhaps a lunge into the passing lane on defence. Whatever the move in question, the basketball player's age and lack of practice are such that the final biomechanical outcome in terms of displacement is blunted and awkward, despite the fact that he senses the intent towards the more highly skilled action. In other words, in attempting to execute the skill the basketball player is confronted by a split in his subjectivity: the intent for the body to move in a particular fashion standing against the approximation of that same intent in the actual body displacement that occurs.

The split is made perceptible by the relatively rapid decline in skilled motion and the intensity of responding instinctively to the unfoldings of play. It is this split-made-perceptible that offers the basketball player an embodied way of understanding Erin Manning's concept of preacceleration: the intent to a particular body movement that is the incipience towards its eventual realization in motion, "the ways in which movement is always on the verge of expression" (Relationscapes, p.14).

So which one constitutes gesture?

Is it the intent toward the more skilled movement, or the corporeal displacement that eventually follows? Often the latter occurs in such rapid succession and with such high fidelity relative to the former that one does not notice they are distinct, but the basketball player would argue this is precisely the case. And given the political significance that Manning, Giorgio Agamben and others ascribe to gesture, which one of the two elements we decide to label as such — or indeed, if we decide to take them both together as mutually reinforcing terms in relation — is a question that seems to merit closer attention.

So embodied are the demands of productive time in a basketball game that a team's reserve players (a form of surplus labour sitting in wait on the bench) will in unison chant a countdown of the final seconds remaining on the shot clock for a particular possession. This can be highly beneficial. For those players on the floor who are so into the haptic flow of the game that they cannot focus visual perspective on the clock, such a chant shifts the sensory cue to the aural and offers the team a better chance overall for productive success (scoring a basket).

In certain cases — as with Cameron Indoor Stadium at Duke University — a majority of fans will join, or indeed lead, such a chant. Though embroiled in the physiological intensity that comes with being part of a sporting crowd, each chanting fan retains a physical memory of time's passage such that there exists a sympathy with those players whose expiring shot clock constrains opportunity. Productive time becomes embodied in such a fashion that one need not even play the game in order to somatically register and respond to its demands. Not only do we see the surveillant gaze of the Foucauldian middle manager discursively brought to bear upon the hardwood shoproom floor, then, but in the Cameron Crazies and others of their ilk we also witness the fleshy presence that remains perceptible even with the emergence of an "immaterial" economy.

(That said, these same fans might in fact have a better intuitive and embodied sense of spectacular time.)

The Peripatetic Deleuze: Biological Flow and Walking as Knowing

(submitted by sean smith and barbara fornssler to the 3rd international deleuze studies conference in amsterdam)

We approach as if wasps forming a rhizome with the orchids of Deleuzian thought. Or, we thank you in advance for legitimating our presence and granting us the power of voice. Nomads or agents of the state, we are not certain as to whom we should address our conference submission, but we shall initiate a politics of approach that errs on the side of the former. And is this not to a certain degree the politics Deleuze and Guattari advance in their admittedly undertheorized concept of holey space: the ability to surf at the threshold between the ever-contingent striations of state authority and the myriad subjectivities and contexts we may understand as nomadic?

Perhaps this offers us a metaphor for our ability to move through public and quasi-public corporatized spaces: the surfer who rides at the break-point between the wave's signal and its becoming-noise, who stays slightly ahead of the movement in order to glide stylishly to the beach. Located in the urban context at the threshold between surveillant optics and smoothing gestural haptics, we will present three artworks from our program of research-creation — Gait Surfing, Kino-Gait, and Natality (Ingrid) — and discuss them with reference to work from Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Massumi, Manning, and Agamben.

inhale
exhale
inhale
exhale
inhale
exhale
inhale
exhale
i n h a l e
e x h a l e
i n h a l e
e x h a l e
inhale
exhale
inhale
exhale
i n h a l e
E X H A L E
i n h a l e
E X H A L E
inhale
exhale
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.
.
     exhale!
inh
      xha
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     exh
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        ale
inha
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i n h a l e
e x h a l e
I N H A L E . . .
EX(in)EX(in)EX(in)EX(in)
EX(in)EX(in)EX(in)EX(in)
E X H A L E . . .
inhale
exhale
inhale
exhale
i n h a l e
e x h a l e
i n h a l e
e x h a l e
i   n   h   a   l   e
e   x   h   a   l   e
i   n   h   a   l   e
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i    n    h    a    l    e
e    x    h    a    l    e
i    n    h    a    l    e
e    x    h    a    l    e
i    n    h    a    l    e    x    h    a    l    e

Department of Biological Flow, December 2008:

Once again, an over-reliance on the visual bias stymied attempts to fully get into the flow of the gait surfing exercise. Originally it was suggested that the surfing subject should direct one’s gaze about 45 degrees below horizontal and abstract the focus of the gaze to about 5-6 feet in front of one’s face. But this still made the exercise too visually-oriented: even if the flow of traffic was moving beyond the abstracted focal point, it was enough to stimulate the eye into refocusing, locating and tracking particular moving objects, thereby reducing any sort of dependence on the strictly haptic and proprioceptive aspects of negotiation and navigation.

Instead, Sean suggested to direct the gaze to 75 degrees from horizontal, such that the visual was deferred for as long as possible before encroaching upon the body’s ability to move affectively through the flow. This definitely worked better for track five, but the continual struggle against the visual remained poignant for both participants.

different types of bows in eastern orthodoxy (wikipedia)
the initial gait surfing study would have had the head bowed slightly lower than position no.1

Can we understand gait surfing as a bowing and act of reverence to the other-in-flux? Can we suggest that it is an act of gratitude for the relation that allows one to be liquid and surf? Can we consider such bowing to be free (at least right now) of the protocol we find, for example, with a bow to the deity or royal figure? Can we imagine this as an Agambenian gesture, or a "means without end"?

The traditional forms of bowing are gestural in quality but are also intensely optic in nature, at least insofar as averting one's gaze denies the optic. Can we further suggest, then, that such a gait surfing bow exists at the threshold between gesture and the optical qualities of language, and as such emerges inherently as an act of politics?

dear you,

ok, say you take a photo of me, perhaps at a cafe in paris or in the mountains of saas-fee.

you post the photo.

i take the photo, crop it, and make it my profile pic.

the extension of your visual domain via camera (kino-eye) thus flips in moebius fashion to become the extension of my skin into the virtual — or what we have called kino-gait.

but we have also said that camera and web profile aren't extensions, per se, but literally parts of one's own body instead, albeit at some phenomenological remove.

hence, such an instance of creating a profile pic becomes a moment of singular plurality between the two bodies. in one sense they become a singular flesh: kino-eye meets kino-gait, eye meets moving skin.

(surveillance meets spectacle.)

(such an instance of creating a profile pic, then, also becomes the moment in which capital most heavily invests.)

at the same time there is a separation: an offer of the photo, on the one hand, and an acceptance but also an editing of the gifted offer. i accept, but on my terms.

how do we understand this particular politics of touch?

do i simply presume your permission to make your eye my skin? does posting the picture online imply freedom to re-use thusly? do i commit a violence in editing the photo? do i offer an injustice to you by assuming that you could and would want to name my skin with your eyes?

dear you, did i engage this particular politics of touch based on prior flesh relation?

or would i do the same thing to a stranger?

Instant Karma's Gonna Get You: Reflections on Movement, Relation and Memory

(submitted by sean smith to the intersections 2010 conference in communication and culture at york university)

In 1966 the Fluxus-influenced artist Yoko Ono presented Play It By Trust, a conceptual work featuring a chess board with two sets of all-white pieces facing each other on a grid of all-white squares. The opponents become indistinguishable from one another in the absence of traditional visual signifiers, and as the hypothetical game progresses the entire binary of militarized competition becomes subject to reconsideration. Using Ono's white chess set as a model I will put the game into play, so to speak, as a means of questioning the interrelated concepts of movement, relation and memory within this ludic space. Drawing primarily on the theory of Deleuze and Guattari, Kittler, Massumi, Manning and Agamben, I will contrast the archive as technical apparatus with a more embodied and intermediated form of collective remembering, as well as explore their implications for political sovereignty in the age of Empire.

Two passages from Jean Baudrillard:

- from "Beyond Artificial Intelligence: Radicality of Thought," in Impossible Exchange, p. 116:

"Kasparov has on his side the human passion of the challenge; he has an other ranged against him, an opponent. Strictly speaking, Deep Blue has no adversary; it moves within the scope of its own programme. This is a decisive advantage for the human, the advantage of otherness, which is the subtle precondition for play, with its possibilities of decoying, of 'overplaying one's hand', of sacrifice and weakness. The computer, by contrast, is condemned to play at the height of its capabilities."

- from "Deep Blue or the Computer's Melancholia," in Screened Out, p. 163:

"When up against the machine they have themselves programmed (let us not forget that it was men like Kasparov who programmed Deep Blue), human beings can only subtly de-programme themselves, become 'technically incorrect' to stay ahead of the game. They may even have to take over the machine's own place. … This is the only possible strategy: if you become technically correct, you are unfailingly beaten by the machine."

ESPN basketball analyst Jeff Van Gundy, speaking about an injured star athlete: "Just because you're getting paid a big salary doesn't mean you'll heal any quicker!"

"the camp intended as a dislocating localization is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we still live, and we must learn to recognize it in all of its metamorphoses." (g. agamben)

* * *

the leisure industry. enclosed spaces. striated spaces. iron gates. barbed-wire fences. tiled walkways. stone paths. flowered hedges. palm tree columns. spectacular spaces. controlled spaces. wear your bracelet at all times. english, french, german and spanish as the official languages of tourism. mexican, italian and mediterranean as the official flavours. edible muzak, vanilla music. authenticity. colonialism, then and now. why does it feel acceptable to speak ni hao and xie xie but condescending to speak hola and gracias? desiring the other. spf 45, 10, 30, 60. spectrum of melanin. skin versus flesh. pattern recognition of facial scans, gaits and volumes. excess fat, excess hair, excess food, excess alcohol. a powder keg of explosive violence. with the lights out, it's less dangerous. here we are now, entertain us. i feel stupid and contagious. here we are now, entertain us. a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido. yeah. instructions for washing hands: 1. soap; 2. wash; 3. dry; 4. disinfect. don't drink the water. wear shoes. hygienic paper covers half left on the straws. fist bumps offered by the staff. gastroenterology. jewish penicillin. too hot, too cold, too humid, too dry. sun worship. photo ops. covert ops. sport as statistical anomaly to the sedentary. in grid. subject, object, abject, traject. dialup internet. (stay in fantasy, maintain disconnect!) heterotopia. heteronormativity. repressed desire. bringing sexy back. techno-femme states that all communication is sexual. a mocking return of the tactile. an imagined lolita. spy versus spy.

* * *

"the social image of the consumption of time is for its part exclusively dominated by leisure time and vacations — moments portrayed, like all spectacular commodities, at a distance, and as desirable by definition. this particular commodity is explicitly presented as a moment of authentic life whose cyclical return we are supposed to look forward to. yet even in such special moments, ostensibly moments of life, the only thing being generated, the only thing to be seen and reproduced, is the spectacle — albeit at a higher-than-usual level of intensity. and what has been passed off as authentic life turns out to be merely a life more authentically spectacular." (g. debord)