(how to make love while dancing on a mondrian)

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"global village basketball is the line of flight. it ruptures the existing hierarchy by networking together the molecular pickup games that exist around the world into one meta-game. it is a collective, yet distributed, net performance of improvised pickup basketball located on a smooth patchwork of hardwood, asphault, terrazzo, concrete and dirt; the backboard is syncretic plexiglass, aluminum and wood; the rims iron, milk crate and peach basket; the mesh nylon and chain-link. the virtual setting of the meta-game becomes the means of deterritorializing the basketball court space" (june 2009).

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[Aside] The third Global Village Basketball game took place on June 8, 2011. A few baskets were scored, robustly. Fun was had, muscles were strained. Art was created — a performance piece of sorts.

Autonomously.

Like the aching/aging muscles themselves, however, the Global Village Basketball machine is also showing its wear. It is most certainly fatigued.

The "me" that is the "I" that is the "we" that signs ets name to this recurrent event, this flexible set of relations — this machine — is most responsible. I have not sufficiently spoken or performed the machine into existence.

The performativity of the event proper is not in its spoken character, though, but rather in its gesture — its movement — co-emergent with teammates and opponents alike. The "me" that is the "I" that is the "we" that signs ets name to this recurrent event have gestured the machine into existence in declining number.

Do we speak of a machine that is at its physically largest size at natality (1182-1121) — one that perpetually shrinks until it dies, a sort of Benjamin Button of athletic poiesis and process philosophy? Or do we speak of a machine that grows, that changes, that coagulates or fragments off and becomes something elsewhere and when, that surfs the thin line between freedom and fascism — indeed, by literally speaking its growth?

Et is fatigued. Et is fatigued by the very weight of ets relational basketball meshes. But this weight — the weight of communication — is also a weight we enjoy bearing from time to time — in all its aesthetic, political, and ethical senses. It is a tactile burden we willingly choose to engage (and even submit to) in fulfilling our desiring-common of and through relation.

When does one put the effort — the work — into communicating this relation and when does one remain quiet? When does speaking fatigue the relation? When is gesture sufficient? When is flux insufficient?

Does the "me" that is the "I" that is the "we" that signs ets name to this recurrent event still have the right to kill the machine?

When is finitude?

Virilio might say halfway, but et is not so sure.

[Exit]

"Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified matter. What are wrongly called 'dendrites' do not assure the connection of neurons in a continuous fabric. The discontinuity between cells, the role of the axons, the functioning of the synapses, the existence of synaptic microfissures, the leap each message makes across these fissures, make the brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or neuroglia, a whole uncertain, probabilistic system ('the uncertain nervous system'). … The same goes for memory. Neurologists and psychophysiologists distinguish between long-term and short-term memory (on the order of a minute). The difference between them is not simply quantitative: short-term memory is of the rhizome or diagram type, and long-term memory is arborescent and centralized (imprint, engram, tracing, or photograph). Short-term memory is in no way subject to a law of contiguity or immediacy to its object; it can act at a distance, come or return a long time after, but always under conditions of discontinuity, rupture, and multiplicity. Furthermore, the difference between the two kinds of memory is not that of two temporal modes of apprehending the same thing; they do not grasp the same thing, memory, or idea. The splendor of the short-term Idea: one writes using short-term memory, and thus short-term ideas, even if one reads or rereads using long-term memory of long-term concepts. Short-term memory includes forgetting as a process; it merges not with the instant but instead with the nervous, temporal, and collective rhizome. Long-term memory (family, race, society, or civilization) traces and translates, but what it translates continues to act in it, from a distance, off beat, in an 'untimely' way, not instantaneously" (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.15).