With professional sport — and particularly those major professional sports leagues that play a large number of games in a season, such as the NBA, NHL or MLB — there exist at least three distinct tempos at play which animate the television broadcast. The first is born of the Flesh that plays the game proper — that is, the athletes that literally provide the muscular motor for the sporting spectacle that is being produced. Fast-twitch fibres, razor-sharp reflexes, power: everyone says the game is always faster — the athletes that much more impressive — when they are witnessed in person, which is to say volumetrically.

The second tempo is provided by the multiple Eye that captures this fleshy expenditure in its becoming, both for telecast to audiences far removed from the sports stadium as well as for archival purposes and their future extractive values — from in camera to on camera. Obviously this is the tempo most apparent to the television viewer at whatever contingency is called home, even though its aim is to achieve a perfect transparency that allows for the truth of sporting copoiesis and its measureable objectives to illuminate the living room or sports bar space.

Paradoxically, this is a tempo of acceleration: while slow-motion instant replay allows the network producer to loop back ad infinitum to show athletic exploits at reduced speed in startling detail, the multiple cuts they entail and indeed the slow-motion techniques themselves serve overall to somatically accelerate a pace that has been largely compromised by the wide-angle tracking shot.

This subtle narcosis of the TV screen is in turn partially offset by a third tempo, that of the Voice (play-by-play, colour commentary) which narrates the athletic emergence and channels its discursive formation in a fashion that toggles between registers of servomechanism and agency. While the fleshy bodies on the field of play must eventually decay and be replaced by other peak bodies, the Voice is timeless — or at least of a pace that introduces nostalgia through the rhythmic undulation of its articulations and periodic spasms of hyperbole (if you are sleeping then you are not paying full enough attention).

Puberty is metamorphosis for the Voice: expression has changed, a phase shift that for both genders generally deepens the tone and produces a different quality of intensity to the air that is expired with every word spoken. After puberty, one's voice barely changes throughout the rest of one's life, even while the rest of its fleshy container grows old and withers. While peak athletic bodies come and go at great pace, the timelessness of the announcing Voice is ensured so long as it does not become strange and lose its ability to connect at this slower tempo.

The Voice is a Skin (or perhaps an aural form of what Serres refers to as a veil) that does not appear on the TV screen too often — in fact, we might consider it a form that ruptures the pellicule (skin) itself. Its performative expression is much less for the television than it is a performance of the television and its network affiliations for the hordes in attendance at the stadium. At the very least the Face of the Voice is visible on-screen rarely enough that the sight of bad toupees, weaves or awkward botox treatments are either barely registered or offer a quaint and queer artefect produced as the excess of nostalgia's claims to truth.

_____________ _ _ _

Rewind: Sept. 2008: "Structurally, late modern sport operates along two primary temporal vectors: it is at once the eternal recurrence of a particular sporting history wrapped in the warm folds of nostalgia (or better, what LCD Soundsystem might call borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered century) and a continual preparation for contagion, processing, incarceration and trauma. Somewhere in between this implicated past and future is the now of consumption."

_____________ _ _ _

Generally speaking, we might suggest it is the multiple Eye (and its interface with the touch of Skin) that governs the preparation for contagion, processing, incarceration and trauma found in late modern sport, while the Voice (and its interface with the touch of Skin) anchors its eternal recurrence of particular sporting histories in nostalgia.

Finally, we might suggest that the Flesh (and its interface with the touch of Skin) both implicates and is implicated by the now of consumption. It is here that exchange occurs, tempos slightly out of joint, though one hopes not overly so. It is here that we gesture towards new forms of encounter, new politics, new exchanges — in part through and with the Skin, but also by interfacing Flesh directly, in resonances of harmony or interference.

suboptimally smitten

intension
a luscious word or
rhythm rolling off the tip
of one's tongue off the tips
of one's fingers off
the tipsy stroll one takes on
the surface of one's face.

face off

interface, starry-eyed
not a force or a face but
a field and a gliding on
which affects play the game.

play off

she runs because she can and
isn't that the point in a
traject of points only seen
after the moment of aching
muscles and intensional sweating pours off?

pores off

i run because i am a program and
isn't that the point in a
traject of points only seen
in a tense future of quaking
connexions and intensional
sweating or fears?

if n+1=<3 then print
"i am sorry"
else off

is the classic scoreboard the lite-brite of the sportocracy?

certainly the only patterns that may be punctured on its face are those that inscribe the rectilinear number-patterns of time and score. but how could they do such a thing? numbers are round and luscious and flowing and curvilinear: gestural markings on a surface, yes, though never meant to be pinpricks of light programmed for a screen-based display (and today's jumbotron fonts are not gestures of the same order, either).

if "all production produces production," as deleuze and guattari suggest, then we must trace the flows: it was the card stunt that taught us about these coded sign systems infiltrating the gridded spaces of the sports stadium almost a century ago. there, too, gesture was captured, though with them light was merely reflected to the viewing eye, not produced in its own right. with the electronic scoreboard, on the other hand, it is the produced light of monochromatic incandescent bulbs that is always in the service of the official record: time and produced output, or what we call score.

two squares of potential in this lite-brite pattern. what about all the space in between, or the enclosure within the enclosure? what if the "invisible" layer of black paper and its prescribed pattern was removed from the scoreboard? what if its brite lites were pushed into the holes in freely formed patterns? what if the lites could illuminate from positions embedded in the plastic grid itself?

colleen wolstenholme
victory lane (2004) — line of scrimmage (2004) — slap shot (2008)

what if the scoreboard lite-brite could be layered upon itself — perhaps repeatedly — such that multiple games were being recorded at the same time — perhaps one giving the cover of reduced exposure to the other?

In order to consume more signal, we must consume more noise as well. The apparatus of the Machine can filter out most of this noise, but human agency is still required to filter out the last bits. Politics occurs in this residual noise. This demands that we continue to interface with other human bodies as well: What parts of the body do we allow the other to touch? Do we touch in sex or sport or anger? When do we introduce a prophylactic layer to any of the above, and when do we not? (June 2009)

craig le blanc
please use me
2004
wood hockey stick, acrylic urethane

dear you: how do i know i am communicating with you if there is always an agent between us?

We have data intimacy with everyone. It is via the network with emails and chats and mixtapes. It is in person with words and fashion and gesture. But we only have physical intimacy with certain individuals. This is haptic rather than optic, a knowledge of and through and located in the flesh. Which begs the question today: Are there things we cannot map? More importantly, are there things we do not want to map? As Michael Hardt suggests, love is a political concept. (June 2009)

"In a word, every machine functions as a break in the flow in the relation to the machine to which it is connected, but at the same time is also a flow itself, or the production of a flow, in relation to the machine connected to it. This is the law of the production of production." — D+G, Anti-Oedipus, p. 36

* * *

February, 2006: We must presume that as the casino becomes more virtualized, thus offering more privacy to the end-user, that catheterization will become the next evolutionary stage for the human-datapod hybrid, allowing urine to freely flow away to unseen underground canals in a fashion that allows for the uninterrupted complementary inflow of (seen) information channels.

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  a sportsbabel multimedia experience
  listen: kode9 and spaceape — "9 samurai"
  before continuing to read, please press play on
  the soundsystem of your mind

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there's a big upcoming sports event in vancouver!

"eh! o' canada — go!"

sit still in your stadium seats and listen.

"he shoots, he scores!"

intertext, hyperdub, replication.
difference and repetition.
meme science.

"did you understand?"