viz. - sports

Violent Encounters

Laura Thain — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 22:39:42 +0000

Louisville Cardinal players react to Kevin Ware's leg injury during March Madness. Image Credit: Yahoo Sports

I’ll admit, I stayed up way past my bedtime last night listening to the Boston police scanner, following as closely as I could the developments in the Boston Marathon bombing. In the wee hours of this morning, I thought about documenting the dozens of news items (as well as widespread speculation across message boards and social media) to take a tally of how much of the information proliferating in the uncertainty of Friday morning would be disproved by Friday afternoon.

As I began the project, it soon proved futile—there was far too much information and I ran into (as I might have anticipated) problems discerning journalistic fact from fiction right from the get go. It was only when I stopped documenting and trying to quantify the evidence that I began to think about the relationship between violence and speculative practice and assemble a quite different archive. [GORE WARNING: the images beyond this cut are NSFW and may shock and disturb some viewers. Discretion is advised.]

What appears here is a somewhat experimental exercise in assembling and reading images of violence and gore. The images below all represent some intersection of sport, violence, and speculative practice. Let me explain why I’ve picked them.

Image Credit: Tumblr

Sporting events are ritualized violence.

Sporting events contain and set limits on the violent impulses of society, translating violence into spectacle for mass consumption and participation. It is for this reason that when violence occurs outside of the set script of the sporting event, the results are often traumatic for both the participants and the audience. Non-scripted displays of violence bring attention to the unstable nature of “appropriate” and “inappropriate” displays of violence. They also cause us to question the ethics of our consumption of violence by juxtaposing structural and non-structural violence; the pleasure of one is interrupted by the horror of another when we witness violence on the playing field.

Let’s look at an example of unscripted violence before the age of the internet:

The video above shows goaltender Clint Malarchuk during a 1989 Sabres game against the St Louis Blues. In a freak accident, the Blues’ right wing slashes Malarchuk’s throat with his skate, severing his jugular vein and very nearly killing him.

Note that the announcers demand the camera pan away from the accident and immediately begin to play a radio ad for Buick over the noice of the crowd’s reaction. Those present in the stands witnessed “many spectators physically sickened by the sight [of Malarchuk’s injury]. 11 fans fainted, 2 more suffered heart attacks and 3 players vomited on the ice.”

Present-day broadcast media is far less likely to pan away from injury in this manner. Kevin Ware’s NCAA March Madness injury, for instance, was replayed several times as they carried Ware away in a stretcher. How can we account for the dramatic difference in the way violence is portrayed and mediated now?

Speculative practice can help assuage anxiety about the unstable line between scripted and non-scripted violence.

When audiences engage in speculative practice about violence that occurs outside the realm of accepted social practice, they are asserting their own boundaries between appropriate and inappropriate engagements in violent behavior. In this way, speculative practice can help create a crowd-sourced discursive boundary where institutional boundaries fail—that is, these institutional boundaries are either inadequate or are subverted by violent offenders.

Speculative practice in response to violence is multi-faceted; it can pursue a variety of solutions to the breach of the code of institutionalized violence.

Tactical approaches can seek to bring violent offenders to justice, but they just as often can seek to levy judgment and punishment independent of institutional authority (i.e. vigilantism). Speculative practice is not, however, always tactical. Speculative practice can happen in sustained, maintained alternative media outlets (reddit, 4chan, conspiracy theory hubs, etc.). Often, speculation serves as a tool to process trauma among online communities that have established relationships with each other (reddit), although it can also happen in settings in which users operate in anonymity (4chan).

With these three principles in mind, let’s turn first to the case of Kevin Ware, the Louisville guard who suffered a dramatic compound leg fracture during March Madness.

Note, as I’ve mentioned earlier, the repeated replay of the injury, as well as the announcer’s focus on the absolute horror of Ware’s Louisville teammates. Spectators reported seeing his teammates vomit and other audience members lose consciousness at the sight of Ware’s injury.

Image Source: Imgur

High-resolution pictures of Ware’s injury were posted to Reddit immediately after Ware sustained his injury, and in a 2,000 long comment chain, redditors weighed in on the injury.

The top-ranked comments on Reddit regarding Ware’s injury were, strangely, not the ones that relished/disgusted in the gore of the injury. Instead, the top comments speculated on Ware’s medical prognosis. Redditors with a wide variety of medical experience made predictions about Ware’s ability to play again, why the wound bled so little, how the wound might be best healed, etc. Commentors also praised Ware for remaining stoic—for “performing” away the injury.

Though the image was clearly posted and became viral because of its gruesome nature, we can see from the example of Reddit that the audience’s speculation attempted to “heal” the wound discursively. The practice of speculation also helps us understand the extreme viral interest in and disgust about Ware’s wound as somehow reflective of a hierarchy of trauma. In general, as exhibited in the case of Ware, twisted or maimed bodies, especially limb injuries, rank higher on the gore scale than mere blood, head injuries, or dead bodies. Why? Because while we might reconstruct a maimed limb with speculative practice—be disturbed by its “inside out nature,” but comforted by the ability to right the inversion—we cannot repair blood spilt or life lost. The horror of seeing a body disarticulated from itself is more immediate but less final than a whole body stripped not of limbs but of life.

The extreme reaction to a Ware’s ghastly injury resembled a similar discussion on Reddit about the following victim of the Boston Marathon bombings:

Image Credit: Imgur

The disarticulation of this man’s legs became the most viewed and commented on image from the carnage following the bombing. And although photos in the same series (also posted to the same /wtf/ board on Reddit as the Ware photos) capture dead or nearly dead bodies, viewers find the spectre of dismemberment far more disturbing.

Image Source: Hug-a-Leg

Again, the top comments speculate on healing—they individualize each victim and speak of their chances for survival, the techniques they hope the paramedics used, the treatment they hope the victims are receiving, etc. In displaying medical knowledge (credible or otherwise), users attempt to, from their computer screens, heal the broken bodies of the victims of the bombing.

Speculative practice can also have very real effects on how a population deals with the aftermath of a trauma. On Thursday, 4chan’s /b/ board released detailed interpretations of FBI-released footage and claimed that the board on the whole had identified the “most likely” (that is, “99% confirmed) suspect. 4chan’s attempt at vigilante justice arguably created only more chaos (as parodied by The Onion here) and, despite claims of 99% accuracy, it took only 24 hours for the /b/ board’s claims to be disproved.

Perhaps I can end by suggesting that 4chan’s speculative practice may demonstrate an important issue for further discussion: that while a shift in the distance between violent act and viewer might result in different responses to that violence, the only way to decrease violent acts in society is to address candidly the disjunction between what constitutes state sponsored, socially-sanctioned violence and non-state sponsored, non-socially sanctioned violence.

Image Source: Designation Systems

Maybe we can start by ditching the drones.

Wallace as Visual Experience

Eric Detweiler — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000

"David Foster Wallace mii Playing Tennis" — Image Credit: Nick Maniatis, via Kottke.org

My first spring in Texas left me nostalgic for my Kentucky roots. This, of course, meant I’ve spent the last few weeks watching entirely too much March Madness. For Kentuckians, without a single professional sports team to call their own—and without Texas-sized performance and investment in college football—college basketball is a powerful source of sports identity. The showdown between the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky in this year’s Final Four was an epic, almost state-shattering event.

I’m not much interested in halftime banter or commercial breaks, however, so the last few weeks have also included a good deal of channel surfing. As I surfed, I found myself catching glimpses of another sport I’ve always wanted to watch more of but never have: tennis. My potential interest in tennis has nothing to do with fond remembrances of my single season as a high-school tennis player (I was horrible). It’s a theoretical interest that is largely indebted to David Foster Wallace. Tennis figures prominently not only in Wallace’s well-known novel Infinite Jest, but in his essays.

The first piece in Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again sets the tone. The essay, “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” comprises a series of personal reflections on Wallace’s tennis-heavy upbringing in central Illinois, but is also a keen look at the visual tableaux and mathematical geography that made up his childhood landscape. Reflecting on his move from IL to Massachusetts, Wallace writes, “I’d grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids—and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates” (3). Consider an aerial view of Philo, Wallace’s hometown:

Image Credit: Google Maps

Lines abound. Wallace’s later description of the town is utterly mathematical—in one sense exhaustively literal, and in another wonderfully metaphorical: “Philo, Illinois, is a cockeyed grid, nine north-south streets against six northeast-southwest, fifty-one gorgeous slanted-cruciform corners (the east and west intersection-angles’ tangents could be evaluated integrally in terms of their secants!) around a three-intersection central town common with a tank whose nozzle pointed northwest … plus a frozen native son, felled on the Salerno beachhead, whose bronze hand pointed true north” (8). Wallace attributes his success as a young tennis player to his intuitive affinity with this environment and its mathematics.

Image Credit: Tennis Help For Beginner to Pro

The mathematical precision of the ideal court lent him some theoretical edge, but it was the vagaries of central Illinois courts and weather that really gave him his advantage: “I’d found a way not just to accommodate but to employ the heavy summer winds in matches” (14). The “wind and bugs and chuckholes” of central Illinois’ unkempt courts were not resented imperfections for Wallace, but “a kind of inner boundary, my own personal set of lines” (15).

Image Credit: Photos Public Domain

When I see the court above, I think of the decay of suburban sprawl. For Wallace, it might be something strangely wonderful, a geometric set of “deformities to play around” (15).

Wallace speculates about the origins of his preternatural symbiosis with his environment: “I’d known, even horizontally and semiconsciously as a baby, something different, the tall hills and serpentine one-ways of upstate NY. I’m pretty sure I kept the amorphous mush of curves and swells as a contrasting backlight somewhere down in the lizardy part of my brain, because the Philo children I fought and played with, kids who knew and had known nothing else, saw nothing stark or new-worldish in the township’s planar layout, prized nothing crisp. (Except why do I think its significant that so many of them wound up in the military, performing smart right-faces in razor-creased dress blues?)” (8-9).

“Wallace’s birthplace, Ithaca, NY, via satellite” — Image Credit: Google Maps

“Ithaca at eye-level” — Image Credit: Budget Travel

Psycho-geographical ruminations aside, Wallace returns to the visual nature of tennis in one of his last published works, “Roger Federer as Religious Experience.” Published in the New York Times in August of 2006, the Federer piece positions Wallace as spectator rather than player. His sharp eye for the game, however, remains. The online iteration of the story is accompanied by such images as

Image Credit: NYTimes.com

The dynamic virtuosity suggested by such an image is powerful, though Wallace might see the image as a poor reflection of Federer’s platonic perfection. He notes, “An athlete’s beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke.” Words fail, in other words. And so does televised tennis, which “is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love”: “[A] TV screen’s image is only 2-D,” squashing the tennis court’s length and thus failing to capture the speed of a professionally-struck tennis ball, which “in person is fearsome to behold.” TV might capture Federer’s intelligence, “since this intelligence often manifests as angle,” but not the sacred beauty of his play. And I might capture Wallace’s intelligence via blog post, but I’d be remiss not to recommend that you encounter his tennis writing for yourself.

Works Cited

Wallace, David Foster. “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley.” A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997. 3-20. Print.

---. “Federer as Religious Experience.” New York Times. New York Times, 20 Aug. 2006. Web. 30 Mar. 2012.

Kiss and Cry: The Problem of Portraying Masculinity in Men’s Figure Skating

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:48:22 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from NBC Olymics website

I’ve loved watching figure skating since I was a kid enjoying the movie The Cutting Edge. This meant that I used my free time last night watching the men’s figure skating short programs. My attention was drawn not only by free time, but also by the extensive press coverage given to the American figure skater Johnny Weir in the last month, especially related to his decision to wear fake fur to the Olympics after PETA threatened to protest him.

Weir’s position within the Olympics and within figure skating discourse is incredibly interesting. While he has a wide and vocal fanbase who enjoy his flashy costumes and artistry, much of the discussions surrounding Weir have to do with how Weir’s flamboyance is either good or bad for men’s skating. (Stephen Colbert, for example, alluded to Weir’s “crippling dependence on fabulousness.”) The commentary provided by Scott Hamilton and Sandra Bezic over his short program yesterday was fairly coded as they drew attention to his “pink tassel” and how “controversial” he is, but the controversy seems to only be whether or not Weir’s fey appearance makes men’s skating look gay—and thus, bad.

Image Credit: Screenshot from NBC Olympics website

The problem for men’s figure skating in general seem to be one of branding: while certain parts of the populace associate the sport with effeminacy and dismiss its claims to being a sport, the Team USA wants it to be taken seriously as an athletic competition. Magazines like Entertainment Weekly focus on the costumes, as did the New York Times in their discussion of the Swiss Stéphane Lambiel, who

either forgot to remove his vest before competing or wore something with shoulder pads that suggested Robin Hood joining the N.F.L. There was a Seinfeld puffy shirt thrown in for extra effect. One of the inhouse radio announcers thought he looked like Count Chocula.

In contrast, skaters like Weir defend their athleticism: “I like sparkly things. I like the theatre of figure skating. But in no way does that make me less macho than someone in a muscle shirt and tattoos with grease stains or whatever.” Aleksei Mishin, the coach for the defending gold medalist Yevgeny Plushenko, emphasizes the importance of the quadruple jump to the sport: “Skating without quads is a time before Stojko, before Urmanov. Who is not able to jump it, don’t make fake explanations. It is a shame to skate without quads.” His language of “shame” ties atheticism to manliness in skating: a manly good skater can do the physically demanding jumps, and an effeminate bad skater can’t.

Image Credit: Screenshot from NBC Olymics website

The rivalry between Weir and his American teammate Evan Lysacek, where the former is considered “artistic” and the latter “athletic,” doubles this fight between figure skating’s claims to being a sport and its associations with homosexuality. Michelle Kwan in one video describes Evan as a “stud” and Johnny as “a cross between Adam Lambert and Lady Gaga” to reinforce Evan’s status as the Team USA champion and the medal threat and Johnny’s status as a less “serious” skater.

Image Credit: Screenshot from ESPN website

Yet Evan’s costumes last night were designed by Vera Wang, and the ESPN front page advertises “drama” by pairing the words with Lysacek’s sparkling, feathered image, insisting on the same effeminate connections that the skaters attempt to fight. Perhaps the problem isn’t Johnny Weir or any effeminancy on the part of the sport, but in the minds of individuals who can’t reconcile sport’s traditional homosociality with the masculinity they project onto such figures. This at least is the conclusion drawn by David Ross, former director of the Whitney Museum, in an interview on Olympic art with Stephen Colbert:

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Analyzing the costumes of the men’s figure skaters and comparing the militarist look of Stéphane Lambiel with Johnny Weir’s pink tassel and Plushenko’s sequins might help students unpack binaries of masculine/feminine and straight/gay and consider how those definitions are culturally and rhetorically constructed.

You've never seen sports bras like these.

erinhurt — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 03:16:03 +0000

I ran across this via Feministing.com, and thought these almost-ads needed to be on the website. The backstory for these ads is that an ad agency pitched them to a running company, which passed on them. They are advertising sports bras, supposedly in a humorous way. They seem menacing to me:

See the other two ads after the jump:

Here are the others:

For me, the blood on these women's faces has overtones of violence, especially domestic violence. Furthermore, I find it hard to imagine that an advertising agency wouldn't be aware of these connotations.

Shirts deemed in bad taste because of "Animal rights, stuff like that"

Jillian Sayre — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 01:21:31 +0000

Earlier this month, a Texas Tech fraternity found themselves victims of their school's solicitation section of the code of conduct. One of the students in the fraternity was selling t-shirts to raise school spirits for the A&M game. The shirts echoed the (strange) A&M motto "Gig 'Em!" with the more timely "Vick 'Em!" The back of the shirt had a football player wearing the number 7 (Vick's number) hanging the Aggie mascot Reveille by a rope:
Texas Tech halted the sale of the t-shirts; citing the code of conduct, the school said it doesn't allow the sale of material that is "derogatory, inflammatory, insensitive, or in such bad taste." The student in question argued that he planned to donate part of the profits a local animal defense league because of "Animal Rights, stuff like that." I guess when it comes to obscenity, like Justice Stewart, those administers "know it when they see it."

This reminds me of the Aggie's "Saw 'Em Off" campaign, ended by a UT lawsuit alleging copyright infringement and solved by the following alteration:

and then there's UT's reprisal:

I think the "Vick 'Em" case is an interesting move in the string of violence against mascots because the case is the first one that deemed truly offensive. Fed by this cartoon violence, this shirt crossed the line in referencing the very real abuse documented in the Vick case. The threat indicated in the other shirts reference real animals (Bevo and Reveille) but somehow the mascots themselves remain at the level of representation. It is the Vick in Vick Em that has everybody in an uproar.

corny monuments

Jillian Sayre — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:37:20 +0000

Building off of John's blog about naval barracks, I offer another form of visual rhetoric made possible by the aerial shot:

They have corn in Phoenix?