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D S NFORMAT ON
Threnody from the Vision Machine
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Sean Smith and
Department of Biological Flow

2001-2046

See and be seen. Interpolate and interpellate. In a gesture of fragility and exhaustion, the Department of Biological Flow considers questions of tempo, intensity and ethics in public space and interrogates opportunities for movement in the contemporary vision machine.

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January 12, 2012
Artlab Gallery
University of Western Ontario

Doors open: 7:30pm
Performance: 8:46pm
'ICQ (Inverted Cubofuturist Query)'

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Exhibition runs until January 26.

Narcosis

On December 31, 1999, the ESPN cable sports network ran its Greatest Moments of the 20th Century, a 6-minute 44-second compilation of the most epic highlights in (primarily American) sport since the advent of television. Set to Aerosmith's "Dream On," the effect is a spine-chilling barrage of significant moments culled from decades of sporting events and condensed into a few minutes of adrenaline-soaked nostalgia. If the average weeknight highlight reel has a mild narcotic effect to it, then Greatest Moments of the 20th Century was crack cocaine, folding a longer stretch of lived time and more intensely felt affects into a televisual delirium whose high fades shortly after consumption.

ESPN's video offers the viewer an accounting of time: in this compilation of the "best" and most memorable moments we have a linear accounting of time extracted from duration — a catalogue of sorts from which one must know all the references as proof of good fan subjectivity, whose cuts may thereafter be rearranged to create a particular narrative order in tandem with the theme music.

In early 2011, athletic footwear, apparel and lifestyle conglomerate adidas launched its worldwide marketing campaign "adidas is all in". Presented as a cosmopolitan moment in global sport and physical culture — at least insofar as its endorsers and target markets are concerned — the campaign's television creative consisted of 15, 30 and 60-second edits of a centrepiece 120-second ad, played at the launch of the campaign and available on Youtube thereafter. Within five months of the "adidas is all in" launch, the full-length version had been viewed over 2 million times.

In contrast with the ESPN video, "All In" is rather an accounting of globalized, cosmopolitan space in a durational moment of time: two minutes of sports and entertainment happening around the world right now. Set to a pulsing soundtrack by Justice, the moving gestures in this dynamic form are asignifiying in the sense that these sports and entertainment figures have been abstracted from referential time — one does not need to know nearly as many references in order to "comprehend" the video text. While Muybridge and Marey used stroboscopic photography to deconstruct the moving body into series of still images, adidas strobes bodies together with light and sound, moving-cuts moving through each break, amodally intermingling gestures as part of the composing form of the biogram.

Amodality

The cut moves from sound to image, as seen in the scene with football players barking like dogs morphing to stadium security apparatus (the latter of which legitimates the contest as an important event):

The cut also moves through tiny explosions of light, "independent" of gesture in their luminescence:

Goal

Eduardo Galeano once described the goal in soccer as that sport's orgasmic form. Interestingly, however, it is Rose the basketball player and not Messi the footballer who scores in the end, providing a release to the pent-up libidinal tension whose point of inflection may be found in the speed bag pummeling of frenulum or clitoris.

This is definitely a schizorgasm we are describing, however. Rose's dunk is immediately followed by a punishing blow to the face in the boxing ring, which sets off a chain of aggression in the succeeding clips. (Consent?) As the pulsing waves of pleasure subside to a refractory period of shopping or consumption we are led through an affective tonality of aggression and conflict: the Haka warrior dance used by the New Zealand All-Blacks rugby team to intimidate opponents; two college football mascots fighting on the sidelines; a figure wearing a protective gas mask and holding a flaming torch, suggesting perhaps an ambiguous recognizance between street artist or political activist and providing a stark counter-punctum to the clip of security dogs and officers earlier in the video. It is intensities that have been represented, after all.

Intensity and representation

A cultural studies read of the text as semiotic is certainly important — for example, within the representational elements of gender, race, embodiment or movement culture — but in a sense these are retrospectively coded understandings.

As Brian Massumi suggests, "The kinds of codings, griddings, and positionings with which cultural theory has been preoccupied are no exception to the dynamic unity of feedback and feed-forward, or double becoming. Gender, race, and orientation are what Ian Hacking calls 'interactive kinds': logical categories that feed back into and transform the reality they describe (and are themselves modified by in return). Ideas about cultural or social construction have dead-ended because they have insisted on bracketing the nature of the process" (Parables for the Virtual, p.11).

It is the movements of becoming-bodies, rather, not to mention their (re)production through sophisticated digital editing techniques that emerge as the biogram and its composing form with which we should be concerned. This dynamism is forged under intense speed, a subtle narcosis of attack on perception that through a particular pathway of movement states simply "I want more."

SpY
ramp
urban furniture installation

colon: right
parenthesis

(three openings located in punctuality))

emotive cons
ampersand prose
probes into the State
of Emoticon
as one types
or skypes hotwire
relational halfpipes

channels, glinting
grinding

re: winding
many muscle pulleys
pulling apple-cheeks to
backside ollie smile,
90-degrees from
ascii style

grim turns grin
to curl the breeze and
open the bright blue skies

sing away
bingo hall blue haze
and bluing gaze
purple haze is in
my brain
(waving)
to a slow jimi limbo. strung
upside down, bluesy.

violetry and poetics
hand in hand

secret weaving and braiding
and waiting and wading

and fading, it blew away
in the blink of
a 90-second while

~

i hardt you
as a political concept
a politics of joy concept
an it doesn't mean you Likes this concept

but think about the politics of touch concept

like with punctuation
in three openings we find
less than three openings
and infinite potentials
for ollies and LOLing
so capital-P stick
your tongue out at me
a Rudolph moment of sunlight
and talking,

solar electricity.

companion species astral
projected. warm snores
detected, soft wear insected
tiny-light hairs coat
the tip of the Ear

~

hear to now
now to here, projection reflected
On-Star U-Turn protected. Drive-In
vision projected Thru to

our network nightmare
incisioned, dissected
narcosis

~

nightmores
eye osmosis

nightmades
black hole
nights made

three-eights hutong
nightshades, flipped to
white-knight bookshades
and sotto voce crossfades

i have a voice.

~

consent to consensus
slow turns meant us
courage slow spoken hence
(12 seconds or whence)

or half again the time
on that great-rodeo-bull
named Fear.

fear not the time
but instead the tone spoken.
steel-spokes broken
steeled, the moment stolen
from its hard bodied
captivity.

fluidity.
hard bodies swollen
steal moments spoken,
steel-toned broker
hard captive
in a time of Fear

not instead.

fluid, free
hard bodies soften
steal moments often
steel-timed breaker,
soft Rupture
and the time is Near

nightmere

~

nearly empty
but the common can't merely
fill the Hannibal Lecter
coffee-machine. hot again,

ravenously angry
or hungry or thirsty,

dried canteen.

but the common can't put
my mere lips to the cup
for the bars wiring-closed
our machine

(no chianti or fava bean)

ravenously
steeled, hot spokes spoken
half-life dipole broken
how many mere bars to
wire-close our machine?

Thought-holograms from the Paris of the 22nd century.

The race begins as a point. Mile zero, time zero.

It is a teeming, trembling point, however: 45,000-strong and electric. Anticipatory, the point smudged out along the line it is about to suggest with its quantity of moving bodies. The point cannot be easily contained, even though it has been corralled. The point is a seething mass.

The point is a constellation of data points, actually, Achilles' heels morphed forward in the foot to the shoelaces and their expressive prosthetic transmitters.

As the gun fires to begin the race, this teeming point of running-bodies instantly dilates. There is a bifurcation of time at the very moment the marathon nominally begins, unique for each of the 45,000 strong. Two times: the "real" lived time of the race clock as the overall event unfolds, and the relative time of each moving body — indexed by radio frequency tag — as it finally crosses the start line to officially enter the event space and "begin" the race. Clock time versus chip time, the latter increasingly falling behind the former as one moves back through the corrals to the open entry gate and its unranked hordes.

Only clock time counts for official race results and ratified world records. Chip time does not serve any purpose in the adjudication of race results — at least in terms of authoritative measurements of the complete extension of the course. It seems it exists solely as an apologia to 99% of the runners that they are not the fastest in the world.

Indeed, the sole juridical function that chip time serves concerns the part-event, with its checkpoints and split times and implied paces segmenting the broader context. As Roberto Madrazo reminds us (in the name of St. Rosie of Bostonia), each checkpoint must be crossed in order, from start to finish. And if there are points of failure in this linear process — points at which chip time is not registered, either due to electronic defect, noise or subversion (ie. skipping a checkpoint) — any subsequently successful measurement cannot have been arrived at "too quickly" to be believed.

Madrazo cheated all too well!!

The race begins as a point but it very soon becomes a line, or more precisely, a curve. The race is the embodied manifestation of the normal distribution curve spreading out over asphault and concrete and steel and rock. From outliers to six-sigmas to outliers, from swift loping strides at the front of the pack to a mixed cacophony of running gaits and styles in the middle to the plodders who bring up the rear: each mile that passes expresses the modulation of kurtosis and skew as thicknesses of running-bodies.

The x-axis of this normal distribution curve, time, finds its striations also embodied in the race proper. Pace rabbits run with the pack holding signs with a desired race completion time on them (eg. 3h:15m, 3h:30m), embodying that given time and helping foster a rhythmic continuity for the overall machine — or perhaps a discontinuity, if understood in terms of an attractor effect. Time has been striated by the body moving within the statistical figure.

But this normal distribution curve is anything but normal. It is rather quite abnormal — not in the sense of deviant, but in terms of the carnivalesque. Costumes and clusters and chatterings identify the runners at the back of the pack, far back beyond even where the slowest pace rabbits will tread. The moving striation of time has become flimsy back here with the plodders, the affective tone of the topology much different than with the other end of outliers chasing down the finish line. An affective, generative tone still exists back here no doubt, and it is this tone that allows for the flimsy to not necessarily disintegrate, that helps as many of those at the back of the pack ultimately complete the asignifying pilgrimage of the race journey.

And in the middle of the pack, and at the front of the pack.

These are not points nor lines we are describing after all. They are certainly not surface-images, either, no matter how hard Spectacle attempts this reduction. They are volumes, actually. Running-bodies are resonating volumes of muscle and bone and nerve, blood and breath and sweat, psychic vibrations of fleshy affect amplified with the in-between energy of 45,000 other runners and the cheers of encouragement from spectators, who share in this radiance-by-exposure while reflecting a certain amount of energy back into the process.

Each of these runners knows a priori that the muscle and bone and nerve cannot sustain their mutual rhythm for the entire Pheidippidean journey. At some point the body wants to fail. And that seems to be the shared understanding of everyone in the race: once I hit that Wall, I just hope the energy of the crowd brings me home. The "energy of the crowd," again, as two-fold: energy from the shared suffering of the other runners constituting one's several-in-passing, and energy from the abstracted Babel of barricaded and cheering spectators.

It is this collected energy that keeps the running-body moving after it has decided it is no longer up to the task. Individual determination emerges from this collected energy to ignore a certain individually-experienced pain and complete the race.

In contrast with the #occupy movements around the world, who teach us contemporary lessons about taking and holding a space, the marathoners, with their smudged point of teeming mass yielding to a distended statistical curve of running-bodies, perhaps teach us contemporary lessons about taking and holding time.

The politics of chip time prove to be a sham. It is the affective politics of a temporary community running beyond one's presumed limits which reveals new understandings of that most Spinozan question: What can a body do? Points, lines and images play tricks with time: the teeming mass of energy dilates to diffuse an effective tremor lasting a couple of hours or until the very last person crosses the finish line. This elasticity of energy is not due so much to the speed at the front but rather the slowness at the back of the pack. There is an exit strategy to these affective politics, measured out at 26.2 miles, however long that takes.

Though almost everyone has some new understanding of what a body can do, not everyone makes it to the finish line. Lactic acid cramps or dizziness literally collapse the running body in a tragic heap of limbs as the final miles unfold. For some the exit strategy came too late, long after a collective affect could make the ultimate difference. Nothing was left in potential.

Desired exit or no, everyone hurts. The sore limbs are still in discord with the warm psychic vibrations of fleshy affect. A mild narcotic euphoria overcomes the body and most of the pain — the intensive stress-related pain, at least — disappears within hours. The rest lingers in the muscles and joints for the next few days, hinted at less and less frequently as other gestures replace the runner's gait. But it is this pain that consolidates the memory of the event, the living archive of the temporary commons woven from physical and psychic trauma.

Pain remembers pain, after all.
_____

[THX 1138 ~ LKL 5908 :: Chi26.2 = woot!]

{{Wiktionary|handball}}

"'Handball"' is the name of several different sports:

* [[Team handball]], Olympic sport in which two teams try to throw the ball into their opponents' goal
* [[American handball]], a sport similar to racquetball where players hit the ball with a hand instead of a racquet, which originates from Gaelic handball
* [[Australian handball]], similar to the Irish and American versions, with a defined culture and rule set
* [[Beach handball]], team handball on the beach
* [[Chinese handball]], a variant of American handball popular on the streets of New York City during the 1960s and 70s
* [[Czech handball]], an outdoor sport similar to team handball, played in the [[Czech Republic]]
* [[Field handball]], the original outdoor team handball, played at the 1936 Olympics
* [[Four square]], also known as downball in Australia, a game played on four squares.
* [[Frisian handball]] (keatsen), a game played in Friesland in the northern Netherlands between two teams of three players
* [[Gaelic handball]], a sport similar to squash where players hit the ball with a hand instead of a racquet

"'Handball"' can also refer to:

* [[Handball (Australian rules football)]], a legal method of disposing of the ball and an alternative to a footpass
* [[Handball (soccer)]], illegal use of arms or hands while playing football (soccer)

"'Handballing"' may refer to the sexual act of [[fisting]].

{{disambig}}

[[fr:Handball (homonymie)]]
[[Eo:Manpilkado]]
[[pt:handebol]]

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[[Edit this page]]

conceptual tennis in
the sunday afternoon ether
no forehands or
backhands, only handedness
like quarks and strrange
lawn attractions.

Hand me your verses,
well-thumbed and digital
game and set theory,
a deferred match
for points made or postponed.

~

the net that separates us
into rackets and packets
mostly made up of air,

waving hands frantically
to know if we're there.

_____

(for robert rauschenberg)

Biogramming Base Bodies: We're All In

In early 2011, athletic footwear, apparel and lifestyle conglomerate adidas launched its worldwide marketing campaign "adidas is all in". Presented as a cosmopolitan moment in global sport and physical culture — at least insofar as its endorsers and target markets are concerned — the campaign's television creative consisted of 15, 30 and 60-second edits of a centrepiece 120-second ad, played at the launch of the campaign and available on Youtube thereafter. Within five months of the "adidas is all in" launch, the full-length version had been viewed over 2 million times. Engaging Brian Massumi and Erin Manning's concept of the biogram and weaving threads of Félix Guattari's schizoanalytic ecology, this paper argues that the "adidas is all in" television creative leverages techniques of in/visibility that have changed the affective stakes for the fetishization of athletic celebrity and its related sports consumables.

"many philosophies refer to sight; few to hearing; fewer still place their trust in the tactile, or olfactory. abstraction divides up the sentient body, eliminates taste, smell and touch, retains only sight and hearing, intuition and understanding. to abstract means to tear the body to pieces rather than merely leave it behind: analysis."

(michel serres, the five senses: a philosophy of mingled bodies, p.26)

_____

"aye, boy, they be playing creckett . . . "

On the unbearable likeness of being; or who the fuck is Alice?

by Jeremy Fernando (sb rmx)

The question that haunts all modern society is that of the individual. It takes the form of either "who am I" (the question of identity) or "what is my place in society" (the question of relative value). Even though they may seem to be unrelated they are actually the same question, for the notion of individuality is meaningless without a point of reference, an externality: in other words, there is no self without another, the other, all others.

And here, if we listen carefully, we can hear an echo of Jean-Luc Nancy's beautiful phrase, singular-plural. In order for any singularity, we have to take into account plurality: which also means that the selection of any singular version, meaning, act, is always already a moment of violence against all other existing possibilities. For if every act is but one of the potentially infinite possibilities (since they are possibilities, one cannot know in advance how many variations there are) there is no way to know if the decision made is a good or bad one till it happens; more than that, there is no way to legitimately choose one over any — every — other. Hence decisions, acts, choices, are always already made in blindness; all one can know is that one is choosing.

But as Milan Kundera so aptly points out, the fact that each decision is made "in an instant of madness" (Kierkegaard) does not make it any easier: the "lightness" is indeed rather unbearable. For the lightness of each decision does not refer to us, but rather to the fact that there is no grund: thus, the onus, and hence responsibility, for each decision falls squarely on our shoulders.

This, though, merely exacerbates the paradoxical situation of individuality: in order to be responsible one has to be able to take responsibility, which would entail a certain notion of the self, and more precisely a self that is independent of all the other factors affecting that same self. Otherwise we would be able to escape this responsibility by pulling an Adolf Eichmann: "I was merely following orders."

But if the notion of a self is meaningless without correspondence to other(s), where would this singular notion be located?

We can hear echoes of this very same question in blogs; where the very notion of the self and its relation to the other, every other, is being addressed. For in order to be a 'blog' it has to be a singular object (even if two, or more, blogs share the same name, each blog is a singular entity onto itself and no other); however, in order for its existence to be known it has to be acknowledged by another, some entity other than itself. Even if the blog was the work of a single person, and (s)he was the only other that referenced it, it would still, and only, be known if that referencing happened in another venue, platform, site.

Hence, what is crucial is that there are two separate situations in place, and more importantly, there is an exchange between them. One must never forget that an exchange can only take place when there is a ground of similarity; whether real or simulated (even if there was a difference) is irrelevant. Even in their difference (for, there would be no need for any exchange if they were exactly the same), there has to be a certain sameness, likeness. Perhaps it is in the very paradox of similarity and difference that the true profundity of likeness comes to light: the alikeness of the exchange must first be liked before the differences that allow this very exchange come into play. And what is being exchanged is nothing other than data.

Here, we must not forget all data bears echoes of datum (thing given). More specifically, the situation of this giving is one where the parties involved are of an unequal standing (for instance, a master to a slave): hence, there is no expected reciprocation of this gift. This is opposed to munus which is a ritualised gift, and where exchange is the order of the day. Since a datum is an unexchangeable gift, this suggests that it can also be objectless: in other words, what remains important is that the gift is in the giving. And it is this aspect of the gift that Marcel Mauss, Georges Bataille, and Jacques Derrida, focus on when they explicate their notions of a pure gift. And if the giving of the gift is the gift itself, perhaps one can argue that the reception is equally important. This suggests that what truly matters in this notion of giving is time itself: what is sacrificed (for, in giving, something is given even if there is no object), a sacrifice that is objectless, "that doesn’t have to be consumed by fire" (Bataille), is the time taken to both give, and receive.

In the context of blogs, it is the time taken to link, share, give, and the time taken to read, re-post, re-link.

Which brings us back to the question that we were attempting to meditate on. The singularity of the self is not located in some notion of self, but rather in that moment of decision, choice, where the self has no choice but to reify momentarily in making that choice. In this moment of absolute blindness — where one is choosing despite lacking any legitimacy — the self is doing nothing but exposing its own unknowability, its own otherness.

At the moment of sharing a blog, the blog is exposed as nothing but the moment of sharing. In other words, all blogs only are singular, are itself, at the point of being shared — sent, read, spoken about, written on.

Swapped.

And it is in this spirit that I am sharing a dear friend’s blog. I present to you, one of my favourite thinkers, writers, photographers: http://alicereneztay.com/

And if you’re still wanting to know who Alice is, surely you’re missing the point . . .

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Jeremy Fernando is the Jean Baudrillard Fellow at The European Graduate School. He works in the intersections of literature, philosophy, and the media; and is the author of 5 books, the most recent being Writing Death. Exploring other media has led him to film, art, and music; and his work has been exhibited in Seoul, Vienna, Hong Kong, and Singapore. He is the general editor of both Delere Press and the thematic magazine One Imperative; and is a Fellow of Tembusu College at The National University of Singapore.