Art Fag City at ArtReview.com: Harun Farocki: Soccer, Stats, Spectacle

by Art Fag City on January 21, 2008 Events

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Photo AFC 

My latest piece on ArtReview.com.  A teaser below:

Letting down the power point connoisseurs of the art world, Czeck-born artist Harun Farocki’s array of statistical sports casting technologies at Greene Naftali has everything but a pie chart. Not that I think anybody actually misses the graph in this intriguing exhibition; I point out its absence mostly in response to the overwhelming amount of data Farocki somehow retrieved from the back-end of one network’s coverage of the 2006 World Cup final between France and Italy: bar charts mysteriously rising and falling, Second Life-like avatar of all the players going about their business, squiggly lines tracing the movement of each player and calculating their distance travelled, the trajectory of the ball, an individual camera seemingly on every player, a digital chalkboard diagram of the pitch with blue and white blobs floating around, scenes of calm and quiet from the tunnels beneath the stands, a live transcript of all the activity in the game, the coaches shouting at their players, on and on…

Full review here.

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