This project started out focusing on soccer boots, and below is a short experiment I filmed to see if I could get more ideas of what to do for the final broadcast.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDobHITldIg]

This experiment involved me filming my soccer teammates during a training session. After editing and reviewing the footage, I realized that by focusing solely on the soccer boots, my teammates were essentially stripped of their identity. Because of this, I found myself unintentionally assigning various characteristics to the different boots in the video. This anonymous nature of my teammates led me to think about similar works we studied involving collaboration, such as Douglas Davis’ “The World’s First Collaborative Sentence”. 

After discussion with Randall, I managed to draw plenty of parallels between soccer and the way people work online. The Collective Artwork already highlighted a few works which involved people coming together to create or perform a work of art. In the same way, soccer requires each team member to understand their role and function together towards a single objective.

My broadcast will essentially be a live ‘game’ of soccer. Just like the video experiment, the whole video will only feature images of the soccer boots. However, I also intend to blindfold some or all of my teammates, thus forcing them to rely more on verbal communication. I think that this would allow viewers of the broadcast to listen to their thoughts as well as allowing the players to heighten their other senses to focus on their awareness of their surroundings.

By focusing entirely on the soccer boots, I want to evoke the sense of anonymity akin to that seen in Hasan Elahi’s “Tracking Transcience 2.0”. My broadcast will be like a webcam into the the game of soccer, to “open digital windows onto real scenes within the far-flung geographies of the Internet”, as Thomas Campanella argues in Webcams: The Subversion of Surveillance (p447).

Overall, what I hope to achieve with this work is to delve deeper into soccer than just the game, but furthermore explore the dynamic relationships between the players.