(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]

clone 1: and i was all, like, the *basketball players* were, you know, forgetting and everything. but if you put them together they could kinda remember, or something like that.

clone 1: (snaps gum)

clone 2: LOL

clone 2: true

clone 1: 8-)

narrator: only then did i learn that brian massumi had in fact already written quite beautiful philosophy addressing this very question. it's called "the bleed: where body meets image".

The Imagined Architecture of Homo Transludens: Networked Sport and Affective Politics

(an excerpt, submitted by sean smith to the social sciences and humanities research council of canada post-doctoral fellowship program for a proposed residency at concordia university's sense lab)

Play is a fundamental component of human cultures, one that has infused other structural forms of the society of Homo Ludens, such as art, philosophy and law (cf. Huizinga). Inherent in play to greater or lesser degrees are sets of rules that channel the conditions of possibility for the ludic subject, whether towards a particular goal or in freer forms of expression. But in the contemporary digital age, these rules of play often become more implicitly rules of a computer system, algorithmically and architecturally so. Julian Kücklich suggests that cheating — with Homo Deludens as a strategic figure — is one way to understand such systems, to learn what constitutes their conditions of possibility and opportunities for agency.

Located in the liminal space between these two strategic figures, Homo Transludens is proposed in this program of post-doctoral research as one who navigates the threshold in sport between rules and non-rules — not in such a way as to cheat against one's opponents but rather to find new opportunities for athletic expression at the ostensible boundaries of play. Brian Massumi refers to this threshold phenomenon of relational movement as the style that generates the evolution of a sport. Homo Transludens, then, may be considered the creative figure at play "who most effectively melds with the collectivity, toward its becoming" (PftV, p. 78, emphasis added).

In the context of the Global Village Basketball pilot project, Massumi's style referred not only to the creative expression of athletic bodies on the court, but to the design of the actual playing spaces themselves. While many of the meta-game molecules played indoors in "traditional" gymnasium locations, many others joined the game from municipal parks or playgrounds. One mother used toy baskets and chalk to sketch a scaled-down outline of a full court in her driveway on which local pre-school children could participate. Meanwhile, absent a ball to play with at the Venice Biennale art festival, two artists mimed on video the gestures of a one-on-one competition, using Alexei Kallima's Rain Theorem — a black light installation of a football stadium crowd cheering — as the visual backdrop for the performance.

This capacity to imagine local architectures helped mobilize a collective architecture of the imagination for networking together some of the molecular pickup games that existed around the world. The Global Village Basketball meta-game was an aggregated, yet distributed, net performance of improvised pickup basketball played upon on a smooth patchwork of architectural spaces. In this sense we may consider it to have existed as a line of flight from the privileged structures and spaces of state-organized basketball, temporarily allowing for new biopolitical subjectivities to emerge in a sporting context.