Team Spirit

Team Spirit is an illustrated talk about competitive sports, the testing ground of the physical limits of so-called Man, where formerly pure and natural bodies gradually morph into the logic gates of an increasingly high-performance machinery. Algorithms track on-court behavior, anticipate decisions, whisper suggestions in the ears of tech-savvy coaches for player replacements and strategic adjustments. Fantasy football-playing robots scan high-speed networks for detailed personal information about potential game-day players, composing the most flexible combination and generating team spirit from the numerical traces of highly efficient athletes in the real-world. Robot journalists send real-time dispatches chronicling the network behavior of these high-frequency fantasy algorithms. Athletes bodies become hardware in the production of data for new types of fans, intelligent agents, neural networks and deep-learning algorithms, symptoms of a larger, more general algorithmisation of everything.

Performances Articles
  • Team Spirit, in Multitudes n°62, Subjectivités numériques, Spring 2016
Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images
Team Spirit, in Multitudes n°62, Subjectivités numériques, Spring 2016
Team Spirit, presented during an Evening on Statistical Bodies, La Gaïté Lyrique, Paris, November 2020