cyborgs, plastic

Breath. When we talk about cyborgs in professional sport, we never talk about the referees who carry whistles in their mouths the entire time to substitute signal for voice: a running-with-the-play, into an optical perception of an infraction and its corresponding sympathetic nervous system response, into a spasm of the lungs and a burst of air expelled through the prosthetic whistle.

Buffer. LeBron James reverse dunking or hitting a three is a factual event; everything else in the televised NBA game is a narrative event, with the referees being a soft gelatin that connects the two. There is an intermediate or fractal quality to this juridical-political-narrative apparatus, though: note the way that former referee Steve Javie is at the League's centralized replay centre in Seacaucus, NJ, providing a secondary and intermediate gelatin between the narrative event and the referees.

Date: May 31, 02018
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sportsBabel

sportsBabel examines the aesthetics, politics and poetics of sport and physical culture, weaving between materiality, information, intuition and intellect. The notes posted here should be understood as emerging from an ongoing program of research-creation.

Threads of inquiry include: the security-entertainment complex and the militarization of sport; mediated sport as a spectrum of interactive possibility; the experiential qualities of postmodern sporting spaces; the cyborg body athletic manifest as mobile social subject; and the potential politics of a sporting multitude.

You are currently browsing the sportsBabel weblog archives for May, 2018. sportsBabel is produced by Sean Smith, a writer and artist from Toronto and a doctoral student at the European Graduate School of Media and Communications in Switzerland. Also a lecturer at various universities in Canada (curriculum vitae), his dissertation is titled "On Performing the University of Disaster."

department of biological flow

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.

The reference is from George Lucas' epic 1971 movie, THX 1138, in which a state-controlled intensification of communication processes manages every facet of daily life in a futuristic society, regulating the flux of all human subjects in work, leisure and love.

Though the Department exists in homage to Lucas’ vision, our consideration of biological flow seeks to reinvigorate the agency of the human subject in its negotiations with economic and political structures both material and immaterial.

www.departmentofbiologicalflow.net

cyborgs, plastic

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global village basketball

department of biological flow

syndication

colophon