The treadmill: prison disciplinary technology, work machine, spinning, grinding. But what, precisely, is being produced? Once the substratum of corn or grain is removed from the carceral equation and the treadmill takes a new turn in the production of bodies, hygiene and spectacle, we can say that the grind is one of spacetime itself: the elongation of the tangent in order to give an apparent linearity to what is a circular process — an illusion of displacement produced, certainly, but even more fundamentally the illusion of history and progress made (and its "high of mechanical annihilation").

The grind becomes ground and the body writes the metrics of its own imagined passage, or perhaps only an endless series of sweaty ellipses — unless elliptical thoughts are of another order altogether.

chip time and fuzzy geolocation. these are the watchwords of a sport at the vanguard of control. a swarm of runners channeled for 26.2 miles down a long corridor, tagged like insects in a laboratory experiment. the clock-foot is synchronized to the clock-eye, which swarms in turn around the course of events, ticking.

touching. spools of clock-skin are spun out along the channel, spun around the city, spun across the network: not a dermal whole, as with a text or a book, but part-fibres that twitch with every passing muscular step — flayed skinny one might suggest as the weaving unfolds.

misty-eyed. the insects run and spray numbers everywhere: we know inexactly where your code is in the swarm at all times.

"Digital technologies have a connection to the potential and the virtual only through the analog. Take word processing. All of the possible combinations of letters and words are enveloped in the zeros and ones of ASCII code. You could say that entire language systems are numerically enveloped in it. But what is processed inside the computer is code, not words. The words appear on screen, in being read. Reading is the qualitative transformation of alphabetical figures into figures of speech and thought. This is an analog process. Outside its appearance, the digital is electronic nothingness, pure systemic possibility. Its appearance from electronic limbo is one with its electronic transformation. Now take digital sound: a misnomer. The sound is as analog as ever, at least on the playback end, and usually at the recording end as well (the exception being entirely synthesized music). It is only the coding of the sound that is digital. The digital is sandwiched between an analog disappearance into code at the recording and an analog appearance out of code at the listening end.

Take hypertext. All possible links in the system are programmatically prearrayed in its architecture. This has lead some critics to characterize it not as liberating but as downright totalitarian. While useful to draw attention to the politics of the possible, calling hypertext totalitarian is inaccurate. What it fails to appreciate is that the coding is not the whole story: that the digital always circuits into the analog. The digital, a form of inactuality, must be actualized. That is its quotient of openness. The freedom of hypertext is in the openness of its analog reception. The hypertext reader does something that the co-presence of alternative states in code cannot ever do: serially experience effects, accumulate them in an unprogrammed way, in a way that intensifies, creating resonances and interference patterns moving through the successive, linked appearances."

– Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p.138

the whole thing is partly inexact.

no, the code is in the miles and the sweat and the pain and the fatigue and the stretching and the training partners and the dirty laundry and the calories and the, and the, and the pantpantpanting.

and then it's in the code. after that, these alphanumerics — but more precisely, the numbers that drive the text and image — have a felt-ness of context and can mean something across the planet, mean something more than just a clinical dividuality given substance as a temporary-or-forever object of information. they can produce new intensities in turn — and call these latter human if you must.

what kinds of meanings, though, or what kinds of intensities? what kinds of affects can these numbers produce from the ocular mist?

proximal, yet missed. some programs have more of an openness than others: did playing fantasy sports or videogames ever make you want to cry?

_____

(lkl 7039: you made it look like a walk in the pahhhk.)

(to be presented at the 2012 north american society for sport sociology conference in new orleans)

Three Simulations: Deleuzian Control Societies and Topologies of Temporary Enclosure

Sport scholars have for some time recognized the disciplinary apparatuses and techniques that govern modern sport and its athletic bodies (eg. Shogan, Bale, Smith, Markula). In the case of professional and quasi-amateur high performance sport, these enclosed, disciplinary sporting spaces have increasingly been permeated through with a variety of networked information and visualization technologies, both to improve productive efficiency on the field of play as well as to create more spectacular products to be sold on the entertainment markets. In this paper offering a case study of the Super Bowl football game, we explore Deleuze's notion of a "control society" emerging within a "crisis" of the disciplinary enclosure by engaging the concept of "simulation" seen in the works of three other thinkers: Foucault, Baudrillard and Virilio. Enclosure itself is understood as a topological form in the control society, in which regimes of the "visible" and "articulable" serve to govern the folds between outside and in.

Kirk Goldsberry has mapped every shot taken in the NBA over the past five years,
in order to create a statistical baseline "average" profile of shooters in the league.

"We can see right away that Deron was good from his right and actually had a pretty off night from his left where he is usually pretty good. However, given his shot tendencies over the last few years, CourtVision would predict Deron Williams would end up with 30.2 points from Sunday night's constellation of shots. My models predict the average points per attempt from every player in the league, from every shot location, so I can plug in these 29 locations and predict an expected success for Deron from these locations. CourtVision predicted 30.2 points; Deron ended up with 36. So, Williams made 2 or 3 more shots than he would have on an average shooting night. In other words, he was +20% from the field that night" (Goldsberry).

- - -

The rise of econometric analysis in professional sport makes explicit shifts that are taking place for working classes across a spectrum of industries. From now on, two figures will shadow every labourer whose output may be measured by some quantitative analytic: the Average and the ExpectedValue. As the econometric models continue to improve — or tighten — the length of the ExpectedValue shadow will continue to shorten, as if the klieg lights and fibre optics were approaching high noon.

Football: the world's most represented sport. Allow us for a moment to misrepresent, to follow a few ruptures suggested by those individuals who understand representation in a different light: the artists.

Rupture: Layer
In Deep Play Harun Farocki makes explicit the political and economic forces governing world class football. Put differently, there is a process of unlayering that reveals hidden layers that inscribe a purportedly free-flowing, improvisational football match and presents them as an unlayering of sorts. The layer of play is continually in dynamic form. Farocki's gesture is to split or tear the flow of athletic bodies into the various mappings and tracings that condition its emergence.

harun farocki
deep play
2007
installation view

Rupture: Space
In Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno effect an approximate synchronization by having multiple cameras all track the same figure — Zidane — throughout the course of the match. Rather than following the ball as the true catalysis of play, as per usual on television, the cinematic experience tears this spatial privilege by focusing instead on Zidane. With sports television we have a contemporary transformation of cubofuturism — at least for the production director, who reduces the multiple surrounding perspectives and times to the flat linear narrative of the screen view. As we move to Gordon and Parreno's cinematic version this cubofuturism has been even more slowly considered to give us this portrait from the 21st century — a study of darting eyes and curved lines of approach, stillnesses bursting into intense flights of effort, economies of movement that must baffle an optical tracking systems approach as with that shown by Farocki.

douglas gordon and philippe parreno
zidane: a 21st century portrait
2006
still from video

But we know these two works well, shiny objects in the Sport constellation of the art market. Allow us instead to triangulate between these two stars to approximate the position of a third . . .

Rupture: Time
In Accumulated Football, the Brazilian/Swedish artist Isabel Löfgren composes a football field by sampling and overlaying screenshots of television frames at regular 30-second intervals, a uniform, rhythmic gesture that opens up a plenitude of diversity within its program. In so doing, she makes explicit the forgotten fact of televised football: for the viewer at home the pitch is not 100-130 yards in length by 50-100 yards in width, as mandated by the world governing body FIFA, but rather exists in luminescent resolution at a standardized 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratio. The field of view is always a cropped version of the live action, whose precise representational dimensions depend on a calculus between maximizing the number of players on the pitch at once and showing each athlete in as much visual detail as possible. It is always a framed subset of the genuine article — flattened, dulled — that is constituted as the visible for the gaze and touch of remote consumers.

isabel löfgren
accumulated football (detail)
2011
photographic print
225 x 45 cm

Modern television production sidesteps this calculus somewhat by adding camera perspectives to the mix, cutting back and forth between various angles and focal resolutions — such as the approach described earlier with the Zidane film. But Löfgren sticks resolutely with the main wide-angle shot, for her interest is less concerned with space than with time. She extracts time from the moving television image to (re)constitute the match anew as a still photograph: layering, transparency and saturation are presented as strategies for compressing and composing time.

isabel löfgren
accumulated football (detail)

As such, the field becomes populated by uniformed spectres that dart along different movement vectors, blurring into betweenness and foregrounding frame rate — apparitions of the multiple body as it moves within time. None of these bodies are necessarily true or false but rather exist in ternary logic: perhaps yes or perhaps no. They suggest alternative retrospective codings to those revealed by Farocki in Deep Play.

And not surprisingly, this compression of time effects a corresponding perceptual dilation of space in turn: the football field simply feels longer than usual, as if "breaking out" or reaching beyond the horizontal boundaries of the television frame has stretched our normal understanding of matter(s). To flip the relation, Accumulated Football perhaps offers a cogent reminder of precisely the box in which we somatically exist, static in both senses of the televised word.

Wired Playbook:

Nike’s got a new gadget that tracks all that exertion and motivates you to get more active by turning your workout, and everyday activities, into a game with a reward called NikeFuel.

FuelBand is a wristband that records data collected by an accelerometer. It tracks calories expended, steps taken and the time of day as well as your NikeFuel score and presents it on an LED display. Your score is based on an algorithm that assigns points to various movements. The more active you are, the more NikeFuel you earn. You can earn it doing just about anything, track your progress with your iPhone or iPad and eventually share it with others via social media platforms.

“[FuelBand] is a common measurement across a wide spectrum of activity,” says Trevor Edwards, a Nike VP.

. . .

Activities are measured the same way for everyone, regardless of how many calories are burned, says Glen Gaesser, an exercise and wellness professor at Arizona State University who worked with Nike to develop FuelBand. He says 30 college-aged men and women performed various everyday movements in his lab. Each activity took eight minutes, followed by a brief rest, during a 90-minute workout. Participants wore a FuelBand along with a portable metabolic measurement system that tracked their oxygen uptake breath-by-breath. Nike engineers used the data to develop the proprietary algorithms that track accelerometer data accompanying each uptake of oxygen. That forged a relationship between physical movements and oxygen data in which each activity has a recognized accelerometry pattern.

Unlike calories, which vary depending upon gender and weight, NikeFuel holds a common score for each type of activity. Algorithms for some movements aren’t always 100 percent accurate, but Gaesser says it shouldn’t affect the FuelBand’s overall effectiveness.

* * *

Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, p.94:

"The invader's performance resembles that of his athletic counterpart, of those olympic champions whose records first progressed by hours, then by minutes, then by seconds, then by fractions of seconds. The better they performed (the more rapid they became), the more pitiful were the advances they obtained, until they could only be noticed electronically. One day the champion will disappear in the limits of his own record, as is already suggested by the biological manipulation of which he is the object, and which resembles the methods of artificial medical survival granted the terminally ill. For the dromomaniac the engine is also a prosthesis of survival. It is remarkable that the first automobiles, Joseph Cugnot's military trolley of 1771, for example, were steam-powered, already situating themselves at the limit of the animal body's metempsychosis, relay of historical evolution: the limit of the passage from the metabolic vehicle to the technological vehicle, spilling its smoke like a last breath, a final symbolic manifestation of the motor-power of living bodies."

* * *

Only the situation has folded in upon itself: as the champion disappears into the limits of his own record, so too does an entire economy of record-production begin to show the cracks of its own implosion. Similarly, the economy of athletic celebrity proves to be straining at the boundaries of sustainability, and the fuel that bursts these stars into the sky only to therein be captured as sources of nuclear-interactive potential is no longer sufficient as an energetic solution for the demands of cognitive capitalism and its tyranny of exhaustion (cf. Bifo).

Sole. Soul. Solar. Virilio demands an ecological approach that fully understands technological culture and not simply its biological substratum. But Nike is already there, shifting from celebrity plutonium to a more diversified and distributed energetic approach in which score resumes its superiority over image, the cellular Everyman with his FuelBand still miles away from pitiful athletic advances and thus ripe for athletic endcolonialism writ softly as ambient informatics and performance exchange rates.

Sold: the situation has folded in upon itself, fuel is produced after the fact, and the metabolic vehicle driving around in fresh Nikes is not quite dead either, exhausted though it may be.