A Foot Kicking A Ball: The Romance of Football

Originally, when I had written the proposal for the research question that I wished to investigate, I based myself around the idea of “representation and the aftermath of football”. I proposed to explore the football world and how it could be revisited through digital moving image. By means of video game culture and new technologies, I wished to re-examine the relation between the public and the screen, the clinical decipherment of a player’s arbitrary decision, exploring a detail that otherwise could not be seen, the abandonment of the screen at the moment of victory when a game ends, the viewer that becomes a member of a nationalist crowd...

Technology has brought us the ability to decode, plunge into details, scrutinize, and come up with our own conclusions; I wanted to experiment with the “bread and circuses” phenomena, whether if it will still work if scandalized, if advertized and massacred in public?

In my original research, I revisited theorists such as Marc Augé and Roland Barthes to assimilate the idea of ‘voluntarism of imagination’ and theories about perceiving through screens. I also tried to explore the work of artists working on decipherment of images and digital imagery that speak to the real on a digital level.

I was planning to investigate a particular case study, which could be the Lebanese football scene. I wanted explore the sectarian, national and ideological associations, and the chants of a team’s public relatively to the domestic political scene. I aimed to produce a sort of an interactive digital moving image that detects the movements of the viewers and connect them to the digital image, wishing to create in that way some sort of complicity between the viewer and the screen.

Nowadays my proposal emerges from a more personal narrative story; I will be working on refining it now before posting it.