NBA: the ultimate manufactory of plastic.

motorized plastic, flavoured plastic, plastic with hooks, translucent plastic, stacey augmon plastic!!, consistent plastic, synesthetic plastic, narrative plastic, timecoded plastic, erotoplastic, etc.plastic . . .




(Olympic Charter, as quoted by Google)

Technically Speaking


A basketball player gets whistled for a technical foul and a free throw is awarded to the other team as a penalty. Almost always outside the normative range of what constitutes a foul in the game — actually making bodily contact with an athlete on the opposing team — the technical is precisely what it says it is: a technicality that has been broken in the juridical structure that is the basketball league proper, most often a behavioural infraction against what is considered good sportsmanship. Some of these juridical prohibitions are universal across leagues, while some are unique to the league itself.

(Usually in the courts of mainstream civil society, it is one who is declared not guilty who gets off on a technicality. Not so in basketball, in which the technicality is always on, always assigned as a penalty against which there is next to no opportunity for recourse or exoneration.)

A basketball player steps up to the line to shoot the free throw. Though it is meant to be an award or restitution for the technicality that has been broken, it is actually quite a difficult shot. This is because the restitution exists somehow outside the normal context of play: the shooter goes to the line alone while the rest of the players must stand and watch out at midcourt, unlike the regular free throw situation in which players from each team line up in staggered formation along both sides of the painted key to rebound the potentially missed shot.

But there is no rebound to be had with the technicality. Again it exists outside of game play, which is to say it exists outside of the game's historical time. And further, it exists outside of its usual relations: while not having the players line up for a rebound is meant to be less distracting for the shooter, their absence is actually quite viscerally felt, a denuding of the multiple body's co-composition that leaves the one shooting very naked and alone.

So on the one hand a player gets whistled for a technicality, but it is paradoxically the one who has been offended (or their agent) who will face the intensity of exposure in exacting a restitution. And the purportedly cybernetic technique of shooting free throws reveals its limits in turn: it is the messiness and chaos of co-present bodies — even if they are competitors — that lubricates this technical machine towards its successful realization.

detailing, digits, painting the corners


"Of course he and she can as easily be she and he (and everything in between). The point is not so much the singular biological body that performs the role of catcher, but rather the catcher's affective modulation of pitching, hitting and adjudicating bodies through a proximity of flesh resonance that we have come to identify as the feminine — expressed in the signal of the called pitch. Ronell's figure of the switchboard operator looms present in this context, though the linguistic signals of telecommunication have been replaced, at least in part, by a more subtle consideration of co-resonance with these three other performing bodies."

(sportsbabel, march 2010)


"Of course, the direct human agency involved to trigger the commands and activate the card stunt emerges as a fourth required element to follow the first three, which during the history of college football is a responsibility that has fallen to the cheerleading corps. Given the gendered histories of cheerleading in football, we might inquire into the specific ways that women were involved with triggering these program activation commands. It seems not a stretch to read the figure of the card stunt leader in resonance with both Kittler's figure of the typist and Ronell's figure of the switchboard operator — that is, one (woman) who can both inscribe a new flow of coded data as well as one who can connect an existing flow-in-potential, suggesting further that the history of technotext is always already a feminist one."

(sportsbabel, february 2010)

sport and political technology


resurfacing, re: surfacing –> once again here's what the post-disciplinary enclosure looks like . . . all that is required now is for these technologies to get "better" and be merged with irregular image flows such as with public surveillance systems in London or Chicago . . .

sport and political technology –> panhaptic, simulated:

- multiple cameras 'speaking' to one another
- markerless motion capture
- extrusion of x,y,z coordinates to create 3D image
- timestamped events
- unique person IDs
- historical databases of typical body movements
- merging of 3D image with statistics
- expected vs. actual outcome analysis
- econometric querying

Dang Vanity Ratio



Nirvana Ago Ditty
A Dragon Nativity

Today Ranting Via
Today Raving Anti

Dignitary Nova At
Toady Ingrain Vat

Ad Organ Nativity
Avoid Gain Tyrant

Avatar Dignity On
Avatar Dying Into

Variant Dating Yo
Dating Via Notary

Tiara Vanity Dong
Avian Tango Dirty

Avidity Gonna Art!
Radio Gnat Vanity

Radiant Tango Ivy
Radiant Vanity Go (Go (Go)

Attain Angry Void
Attaining Ova Dry

Data Navy Rioting
Vagina Yarn Ditto

Radon Gait Vanity
Diva Gyration Tan

Vagrant Nay Idiot
Aviation Dang Try