The Architecture of the Screen

by Graham Cairns

  Placed in the hands of the sports spectator in the stadium, the incorporation of this level and range of personalised media access would represent a significant step towards the complete hybridisation of sport spectatorship. In a scenario in which the live, visceral action on the field of play is accompanied by simultaneous televised images, the nature of the live event would be fundamentally mediated and altered; a constant current of electronic stimuli would be provided to complement, extend, interpret and “improve” the spectacle of the live action and the real event. Picking up on ideas dealt with by Cornel Sandvoss, this “improvement” on the real is already experienced by the television spectator and indicates that we have already entered the age of the sporting “hyperreal”. 59 It is a scenario that leads us into realms envisaged by Paul Virilio in which “real life” becomes completely hybrid. In this hybrid future, the technologies of contemporary vision blur with the nature of human optical experience, and sport is never again experienced “live” in the conventional sense. The stadia too become venues for half-human, half-televisual events and experiences.

  The hybridisation of vision

  Perhaps the most obvious example of how the real events of the sporting stadium are moving in the direction of this half-human, half-televisual experience is to be found on the field of play itself where digital television imagery is already fully integrated into the human act of playing the game. The employment of television technologies to help officials make key decisions during the course of a game or event is fully accepted in sports such as athletics and cricket. In these contexts, television replays have been central to the photo finish or the umpire decision for a number of years. For competitors in these games and events, television and sport are part of a symbiotic relationship that goes well beyond funding and promotion. It is part and parcel of the physicality of the competition itself.60 In football by contrast, this fusion of the physical and the mediated has yet to be fully accepted by the sport’s governing body, UEFA. Here, there still seem to be remnants of a romantic past in which human error was an acceptable part of real events and television’s role was to do little more than observe events. In this context, television has yet to take up its place as the final authority, as well as promoter, of the sport.61

  In the face of a number of high-profile errors in recent years however, this position is under threat. In a situation in which supporters can re-watch an incident on the big screen in the stadium, and repeatedly see it from different angles at home, the pressure on UEFA and the officials themselves is growing. It represents what Paul Virilio calls “a loss of faith in the eye”.62 Unable to believe or trust our eyes in the face of ever more accurate visioning technologies, Virilio suggests that in every context of life, it is just a matter of time before the human eye is completely replaced by some sort of visioning technology. In this broader context, the elimination of errors of judgement in a sport such as football, through the employment of modern technologies of sight, seems inevitable.

  In a scenario in which the spectators inside the stadia, officials of the game and the viewer at home all have exactly the same perspectives on every aspect of the event, there will, in theory, be no room for disagreement. The conflicts between fans over the legitimacy of a goal or the fairness of a referee’s decision will be a factor of the live sporting event consigned to the past of a pre-technological age. We will see what Virilio calls the “automation of perception”, but we will also see what he refers to as “the standardisation of vision”; the imposition of a unique and unquestionable visual truth that will be the same for everybody: referees, players, spectators in the stadium and the viewers at home.63 The hybridisation of the sporting event will lead to its homogenisation.

  However, this hybrid standardisation is only part of the story that could unravel once the most advanced televisual technologies are incorporated into what Cornel Sandvoss calls the “in-situ” spectator experience.64 If Rod Sheard’s vision emerges and spectators in stadia have access to hand-held televisual devices, they will be bombarded with a constant current of televisual information that will accompany the live event. Although its precise nature may be impossible to predict, today’s television and online formats may well be the basis of future tropes: instant replays, slow-motion action, frozen shots, on-screen analytical graphics, diegetic sound effects, running commentaries, backstage images, behind-the-scenes interviews and, of course, multiple advertising discourses. In addition, we may expect the presentation of all types of statistical information regarding the teams, the event and individual competitors or athletes. Furthermore, we should expect interactive participation in “phone-ins”, active collaboration in online supporter debates and possibly even supporter engagement in the production of serious online journalistic content.

  Once, as supporters in a stadium, we have access to such technological devices offering this range of statistical information and visual stimuli, our engagement with the live sporting event will have mutated, almost beyond recognition. As happened with the introduction of television to sport in the past, we would be forced to rethink the nature of spectatorship. Only this time, the extent of that reformulation may be more profound.65 Although different to our sensorial perception of the “real” events however, our engagement with sport through such channels is now so common that we adapt with little, if any, difficulty. In terms of visual representation for example, the tropes of television coverage are now so completely engrained in the mind and eye of the average sports follower that they are considered “natural”, or at least second nature. The replay, slow motion and analytical graphic, for example, are part and parcel of televised sports coverage in all its formats, such as live coverage, highlight programmes broadcast after the event and in trailers advertising future contests.

  These formats use their own combination of tropes and thus produce their own specific brand of visual effect and mediated engagement. For example, live coverage relies more exclusively on the inherent tension of the game or event in question than edited highlights do. As a result, it tends to fragment and break up the natural flow of the images with less frequency than any other format. By way of contrast, the presentation of highlights reduces the extended experience of the spectacle to a few hierarchically ordered moments.66 These moments are presented in a more fragmented manner but, in exchange, permit the introduction of more analysis and information through commentaries, interviews and repetitions.

  Despite their inevitable fragmentation of the real event, edited highlights normally maintain the sequence of the real events in order to relate them in a coherent way. They thus follow the basic narrative rule that underlines most sports coverage: follow the action.67 Such narrative veracity is completely unnecessary in the trailer format which is free to break the spatial and temporal unity of its footage in order to heighten the dramatic effect it seeks. The trailer can take on the form of a music video, complete with soundtrack and a whole series of special effects which enhance its visual and emotional impact on the mind of the viewer. It has no intention of imitating the physical or optical reality of the events it presents and requires the eye to work in a completely different register to that required of the spectator inside a stadium. As opposed to following one specific, related and sequential set of actions taking place in a spatially bounded and definable location, here the eye and the mind are absorbing multiple, often simultaneous visual and aural stimuli. Both time and space are dislocated.

  One of the newer visual technologies to be developed in recent years and employed in all three of the televised formats mentioned here is the player-cam, which has high-definition cameras and highly directional microphones that combine to offer television viewers a focused set of images of one specific player or competitor. Often superimposed in a portion of the screen, these images do not replace our televised view of the overall event, but rather supplement it with simultaneous secondary imagery that gives us a sort of double on-screen vision. This technology allows the camera view to get so close t
o the players or competitors in question that, in one of the most celebrated examples of recent years, Zidane: A Twenty First Century Portrait, the effect has been described as actually “being Zidane”.68 Made by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno in 2006, this film was heralded as the most adventurous experiment in the history of its genre. It presents us with extreme close-up imagery of what Peter Bradshaw calls “the presence of a Coriolanus, a martial hero of uncontrolled severity and anger”69 (Fig. 5).

  Figure 5: Zidane: A Twenty First Century Portrait.

  Described less as a documentary and more as a document of a live event, its visceral nature has made it particularly difficult to categorise; a difficulty heightened by the fact that it has been shown in art galleries as an installation piece as well as being shown in main stream cinemas as a narrative film.70 It uses seventeen cameras developed by NASA and used by the US military to follow the legendary French footballer for the entire ninety minutes of a game played for his last club, Real Madrid. Rejecting the basic rule of football coverage and editing, it ignores the sport’s normal narrative guide, the ball, and exclusively follows Zidane in his playing of the game.

  It uses technology that includes the most advanced zoom lenses available, diegetic sound effects, superimposed text and a mixture of standard televised sports footage. In addition, it employs news from around the world shown during the half-time break and thus presents the viewer with a complex mixture of images, facts and sounds. Despite this use of multiple techniques, the film’s most celebrated characteristic is its constant close-up images of Zidane in the physical act of playing the game; images in which the sweat on his brow, the grimace of his face and the physical exertion of playing are all brought to life. Emphasised by the use of directional microphones that pick up the sound of him shouting, breathing, tackling and kicking the ball, the film becomes a visceral documentation of the real experience of the footballer, a celebration of “the body on motion”.71

  As conventional film or television, Zidane: A Twenty First Century Portrait is the closest experience possible to the “real thing”. It goes beyond what are generally considered the limitations of the televised sporting experience, the inability of television to capture the sound and atmosphere in a stadium. Consequently, it produces something much richer, more complex and more physical.72 In comparison to the spectators in the stadium, even those in the seats closest to the field of play, it is a film that takes the spectator at home much closer to the bodily action of the live event. It goes beyond the hyperreal into the realm of the hypervirtual. If this type of televisual experience becomes part of Sheard’s vision of the future for sports spectatorship inside the next generation of sports stadium, it would revolutionise not only the nature of sports spectatorship but possibly also the nature of vision itself, turning the act of watching into something ever more visceral and phenomenological.

  In this scenario, we would simultaneously watch the real events on the field of play whilst observing intense physical exertion electronically. Consequently, the experience of the sporting event for the live spectator would involve the spatial and temporal unity of the real action, the more fragmented, mixed and overlaid visual phenomenon of its mediated representation on screen, and a physicality of experience more closely associated with playing the game than watching it. The eye of the viewer would be forced to operate in two registers simultaneously, one based on the optics of the human eye and the other based on the technological visual tropes of television. Counter intuitively, it would be the second of these that would make the experience more real, more visceral.

  In various essays, Paul Virilio has defined this type of mutated and hybrid visualisation as phenomena that now characterise the modern world and which, taken to their extreme, threaten to “replace physical proximity with mediated experience”.73 Most obviously seen in the context of the television viewer of sport, this challenge to the primacy of the physical is far from new. Indeed, it has been covered in a whole series of other contexts including the bellicose, the social and the cultural. Jean Baudrillard,74 Guy Debord75 and Marshal McCluhan are just a few of the most iconic authors to have dealt with it. For all of these theorists, the technology of vision superimposes itself on the reality of physical experience and threatens to turn our active engagement with the world of events into a passive absorption of predetermined images, what Virilio refers to as “passive optics”.76

  The notion of replacing the physical with the mediated, however, is based on a supposition that Cornel Sandvoss finds at the heart of the spectatorship of football fans: the reading of the real event and its coverage of television as separate entities.77 Incorporated into the stadium experience itself however, the superimposition of new televisual technologies would not represent a separation of experiences but rather a sort of double-mediated vision; a mutation of sight in which the televisual does not replace the eye and its engagement with the physical, but merges with it. In this reality, the real-virtual fusion of the contemporary world evaporates in a technologically controlled “videoscopy”.78 We enter a new altered visual world in which the “vision” of the eye is conjoined with the “visualisation” of the lens and physical action is experienced with greater veracity than ever before.79 In the context of sport, and the future sports architecture, the full incorporation of televisual technologies in the physical infrastructure of stadia would represent a type of culmination for a process that began with the first televised images of the sporting event. It would cement a “symbiotic relationship between sport and televisual image”.80

  In this brave new sporting future, the spectators in a stadium no longer simply shout, cheer and applaud in unison. They also watch the slow-motion replays on the giant screen together, analyse action on their hand-held video screens and comment on a move or sequence online. They may also research a player or engage in communal channel hopping as they simultaneously avoid adverts introduced during breaks in play. Additionally however, they may also revel in the blood, sweat and tears of their favourite athletes or players as they celebrate victory or collapse on the ground in defeat. They may well experience something akin to “being” their star. Replacing the 3D spectacles parodied by Guy Debord with large screens, hand-held television devices, directional audio kits, headphones, temporary electronic implants, or whatever else technology has in store, the society of the modern sporting spectacle could very soon mix the personal with the common and blur the real with the unreal. Television and its modern derivatives could end up turning sport into a completely hybridised optical phenomenon that not only changes the design of stadia but also the nature of vision. By extension, it would fundamentally change the way in which the public understands and experiences the sporting event.

  Conclusion

  The potentially radical developments outlined here in the nature of sport spectatorship have their roots in the emergence of television as late industrial society’s principal leisure medium. The mass audiences it brought with it in the second half of the twentieth century gave it immense financial power which, in turn, underlay its continuous technological development and its ever greater invasion into other sectors of contemporary culture including, obviously, sport. What we have tried to do in this essay is trace out the background to that development in the context of sports architecture and identify two principal issues of relevance today: the various consequences televisual technologies have had on stadium design and, more speculatively, the consequences they have had, and may have in the future, on the spectator’s experience in those stadia.

  Considering the relationship that developed between the Olympics and television in the second half of the twentieth century, we highlighted television as the key factor in understanding how the Games came to dominate the world’s sporting calendar in the way it does today. By extension, this also explains the extreme lengths competing host nations go to in their bids to hold the Olympic Games on their shores; an opportunity that has been used in recent years to regenerate cities, push long-term t
ourist benefits for entire regions and boost national economies in general. Sports architecture in the televised age is not something we can consider in isolation or simply in the context of broadcasting revenue. It is something that gets drawn into a complex economic, promotional and mediated sporting web that fundamentally alters its conceptual nature and its practical design requirements.

  Converting architecture into symbols of cities, cultures and countries, the international televising of events such as the Olympics, we suggest, forces us to consider major international sports stadia not as buildings constructed primarily for physical users. Rather, they are buildings constructed around the requirements of the television broadcasters and the viewers of sport at home in front of television screens. As a result, we are required to reframe the architecture of sport as the architecture of a television spectacle and thus begin to reconsider the nature of their physical design. The most obvious consequence of this has been the birth of the iconic sporting building, representing the age of the architectural media spectacle or the sports stadium as television set.

  Perhaps most notably seen in the recent Beijing Olympics, this tendency is, however, only one example of just how detailed the influence of television on sporting architecture has actually become. Using examples from the Olympics in Munich, 1972, Barcelona, 1992, and Athens, 2004, we have also suggested that very specific adaptations of architecture for the televisual image are possible and, indeed, common. They are certainly likely to become ever more common as the international media event of sport grows and expands. Such detailed adaptations of architecture to the requirements of the television image represent a level of detail in architectural design that is as yet unexplored. If developed, it could turn the architect of future international sporting venues from a designer of buildings into something more akin to a director of films.