Podium | Rosannagh Maddock

Podium

Podium: Gold, Upper Panel

Podium: Gold, Centre Panel

Podium: Gold, Lower Panel

Podium: Silver, Upper Panel

Podium: Silver, Centre Panel

Podium: Silver, Lower Panel

Podium: Bronze, Upper Panel

Podium: Bronze, Centre Panel

Podium: Bronze, Lower Panel

Podium: Gold, Caption

Podium: Silver, Caption

Podium: Bronze, Caption

Podium: Display Mock-up

Podium

A Reflective Commentary

Rosannagh Maddock, 2024

Contents

1. Outcome

2. Fashion

3. Collage

4. References

Outcome

Description

This project is the culmination of three years of in-depth interdisciplinary research. It began with an identified need to develop the field of sportswear history through the medium of visual archival research. Funding from techne, the doctoral training partnership, was awarded in order to produce a body of work, developed out of under-utilised object- and image-based collections in museums. A range of methodologies and processes were utilised over the three-year period, with graphic artworks, essays, discographies and poetry forming a portfolio of creative markers. The need for a concluding summative statement was established and ‘Podium’ is the result. A triptych of triptychs, it blends ephemeral digital collections, historic sporting imagery, film stills and fashion imagery in a collage process that highlights the vast potential of fashion’s popular vernacular of the ‘moodboard’ to contribute to complex, forward-thinking research.

The images that constitute the raw data have been gathered through an extensive trawl of varied collections: from digitised collections held by major museums, uncatalogued archives, national library collections and stock photograph databases, to personal ephemera collections, deep-dive google searches, and movie screen grabs. Each panel is A2 in size and explores a facet of success, spanning the highs and lows of achieving the podium of many classic sports. Each A2 panel is stacked, thematically and physically, vertically, one atop the other, to form a roughly six-foot block of three images. They can be staggered in the form of a podium, with silver, lower, on the right side of gold, and bronze, on the ‘first step’ on its left. The result is akin to a bar graph, and its statistical, data-heavy effect is an intrinsic result of rigourous process. I once saw an infographic with a small branch from a pine tree on the left, and the sticks and pines, now disassembled, all laid out in a row on the right, and the title was something along the lines of ‘this is what statistics does to us’. By taking imagery and information that would normally be consumed in linear fashion, in readily comprehensible context, and piling it upon itself, I hope to achieve a sense of the vitality of embodied human competitive endeavour, and its messiness. Each ‘medal’ or ‘position’ of three images was sorted according to an open-ended logic: the upper panel features triumphant themes, the centre panel technical, process-based themes, and the lower panel what can be considered the ‘downside’ of each position. As such, it forms a disrupted x-y axis of sorts, a flowing grid of perspectives. Each medal is accompanied by a caption, gleaned from my research, which highlights a story or set of data that offers a textual approach to this visually-rich collage-based research outcome.

Summary

Podium is a series of collages made with the goal to enact graphic fashion theory, working in a feedback loop with fashion practice, at the coal-face of cultural production. These triptychs are intended to enmesh with the playful mundane, like a mirror or a map, producing an alternate perspective on sportswear and competitive activity in the embodied actions of the user, becoming a tool, which they can then take with them as they make fashionable choices about how to be.

Process

I started by going through my extensive personal ephemera collections, which I have collected both habitually and as part of my personal response to the more formal research methods that I also pursued. I have USB sticks full of random collections of inspiring imagery from every possible source. This is the central process in my daily output of collaged moodboard production, which works as a track record of trend forecasting for fashion practice. I sorted these images into three piles: films, texts, memes and fashion in the first, sports history in the second, and decorative arts images with thematically-appropriate textures (metals, colours) in the third. Each of these piles was then sorted into gold, silver and bronze. A final sweep, sorting each medal into ‘triumph’, ‘practice’ and ‘downside’ (upper, centre and lower panels), concluded this process, which lasted about five months. The collage creation process, on the other hand, was quick. Speed, as seen in the last section of this commentary, is a key concept in the formation of power, effectiveness, and fashion-ability. Fashion, as a public artform, is instinctive and works best when by-passing conscious deliberation – its value lies as a kind of automatic dressing – it expresses a collective subconscious, which only slowly comes to the conscious mind, much later. I formed the fashion, film, and textual imagery into the first layer of grid-based, standard moodboards, in photoshop. I then produced another layer out of historic sporting imagery and deleted sections of this with a crisp, clean circular eraser, revealing the silliness beneath. The third layer was formed out of textural, thematic museum objects, including many medals, and blended into the other two layers with a soft eraser, producing an airbrushed effect that contrasts with the clean lines of the previous layers. A range of layered textures is the result, with a graphic-novel feel.

Rationale

Another aspect of this research, more traditional (archival, theoretical and literary) in scope, had been formed into ‘teams’ as a means of ensuring a holistic, even-handed inclusion of disciplines. The teams were: GBC (garment, body, car – emphasising embodied practices); RCG (race, class, goal – a social history perspective); TNL (track, nation, land – a geographic approach); AMP (art, moral, philosophy – the more literary and art historical grouping). These teams produced varied results. Some disqualified themselves. Some impressed. At times, all were left by the wayside. The podium became a logical result of placing these components of traditional academic research processes in competition with each other. The judges may have been biased, but the body was the winner.

Case Studies

The work that led to this outcome took many turns and expressed itself in many ways. The central process, however, was the creation of hybrid visual-formal case studies of sportswear garment typologies, each formed of the aforementioned teams. In 2022 I produced a huge quantity of collages – which would constitute three full-length monographs if printed. I also produced written, essayistic components of many of the case studies, which ranged around in team-sport intellectual method, utilising economic history, technical analysis, biography and literature. The sheer heterogeneity of the work produced in 2022 and 2023, based upon archival object-analysis, oriented around a core of imagery from major museum collections of sportswear and sports history, meant a standard thesis became an increasingly impossible option in order to best reflect the scope of the research and highlight the strengths of the subject of sports and fashion – vitally embodied, visual media.

Above: Lou Salomé, sometime girlfriend of Friedrich Nietzsche, left; Tod Sloan, infamous jockey, centre; Albert de Dion (tall) and Georges Bouton (short), pioneer motor car designers, right.

The first case study was the walking dress, popular among upper-class women of the later Nineteenth Century, and employed for a variety of physical pursuits in an increasingly active and liberated lifestyle. The gradual relaxing of the corseted silhouette apparent in these garments reflected the extremes of rational and aesthetic dress and the loose knits of the Twentieth Century.[1] The second case study was jockey silks. Jockey silks exist at the meeting point of a host of conflicting priorities. They are arguably the first famously visible and recognisable sports kit as part of their role in the first mass spectator sport. Their history is significantly under-researched and few physical examples are found in major museum collections. Jockeys were largely working class, immiserated and abused in search of racing results (through culturally enforced anorexia and alcoholism, for example). Many of the surviving examples of jockey silks in major museum collections are in fact children’s fancy dress outfits.[2] The third was the duster coat, beloved of Edwardian motorists and direct ancestor of the trench coat. The Edwardian motoring duster combines various design trends– colonial dress, wild west dusters, bush jackets, Garrick-style coachmen’s coats, shop coats and doctor’s white coats – all growing in popularity from the 1880s onwards. What connects these varied pursuits is protection in work, especially work connected to the body. It is a shorthand that anonymises bodies in public space, hence its strong association with the new, pure work of the Twentieth Century – scientists, engineers, and doctors all utilised its capacity to communicate selfless pursuit of de-personalised rationality. Each of these garment-typology deep dives can be related to each of the component parts of Podium, with gold reflecting the liberatory themes apparent in the walking dress, silver the questions of iconography and technology in horse racing, and bronze, the scale of mass team-based efforts and the structural function of triangulation expressed in the seeming rationality of the pale duster coat.[3]

Hard Copy and Display

These images and processes are born-digital. Their form, three A2 documents each, is intended to have the potential for physical display in the form of three six-foot blocks, each stacked on top of the other, positioned as though athletes on a podium (see display mock-up, above). But, as I am not a contemporary artist in background, orientation, or make-up, ensuring their display in a gallery is not my priority. They will be submitted as a final outcome of this PhD research archive-ready: each ‘position’ will be individually uploaded onto a Sandisk USB stick (32Gb), along with its caption and this reflective commentary, then attached to a re-purposed key ring formed from a coin composed of an appropriately-coloured metal. Each USB-coin object, furnished with ephemeral data, composed in humane, contextualised, form, will then be placed in a storage box. Each box is of a differing size, with gold in the largest box and bronze in the smallest. Padded out with acid-free tissue paper in these boxes, they will then be placed in a banker’s box, surrounded by more tissue paper, and made ready for their eternal position in the pantheon, as hidden building blocks, maintaining triumphal object-based order in the archive. Digital, open-access presentation takes the form of a Tumblr page titled ‘Podium Project’ and a page on my personal website.[4]

Usage

Option A: Print and cut up the pages as you deem appropriate, shuffle and distribute the pieces while on a run, as if you were a school boy on a paperchase.

Option B: Turn a print-out into confetti. Trespass an academic seminar and decorate the room whenever someone stops talking.

Option C: Lay a panel on the floor, in the countryside. Ask your local fairy gang (nicely) to play a game of Twister, using dungeons and dragons’ dice and the colours of the sunset/sunrise as prompts. Make the winner your king.

Option D: Make it into a hat. If you do not have a head, don’t worry. Photoshop the hat onto pictures of celebrities instead.

Option E: Read each panel very literally as containing data points on a graph. The centre is the core of the axis and negative and positive data are above and below. What conclusions can you draw from the data-set? Does the study have any flaws?

Option F: Find Nietzsche.

Option G: Choose a character from among the panels. An athlete, model, or animal. They can change appearance throughout. Zoom in at various points, travelling randomly throughout the panels, back and forth. Tell a story about what is happening the character, based on what is happening around them. For example, in the gold panel, Lisa Simpson threatens to kill Homer Simpson. Homer then wakes up in the real world, shocked to be among the icons of Mount Rushmore. His head is then turned into the FIFA World Cup trophy. What happens to Homer next? Will Lisa pay for her crime?

Option H: Save a copy of your preferred panel to your hard drive. Email it as an attachment instead of calling in sick to work. They’ll learn what you mean eventually.

Option I: Invent another way through. Devise new rules.

Fashion

While this research is primarily centred around practical engagement with understudied fashion and sporting collections, and spins out directly from critical cultural, object and image analysis, it sits among intersecting fields of active scholarship that pursue varying methodologies. The value of this project lies in its potential to present a view of the potential of sports and technology history intersecting with fashion history in both formal and informal frameworks to articulate the way fashion operates with authority. By understanding how fashion incentivizes through glamourous behaviour and stimulating embodied practice, we can trace a feedback loop and come to a fuller understanding of how modern society works with social technologies like fashion to embed speed and competitive innovation as desirable qualities. This hypothesis can be tested in a number of ways. Relevant approaches and methodologies can be found across the spectrum in fashion, textiles, engineering, architecture, sports and gender studies. Popular methods include analysis of advertisements, photographs, contemporary media depictions and more traditional methods such as close reading of contemporary literature, high art, and administrative archival collections. Of particular interest to me, and in my opinion understudied, is the intellectual history of what could be termed generative design theory. As a researcher I am interested in what ideas people hold in their minds about fashion and design as they make active design interventions that have the potential to change the course of our lives and culture. Intellectual history is difficult to pin down and objects can speak volumes.

While many of the studies in print do not share my exact interest, intersections do exist, primarily from the more theoretically-minded fashion histories. A key survey of the topic of fashion and technology comes from Phyllis G Tortora in the form of ‘Dress, Fashion and Technology: From Prehistory to the Present’ (2015).[5] Tortora’s study gives great varied detail on the relationship between technology and fashion, structured around the core of the industrial revolution, and goes a long way to address the gap between studies of fashion and studies of technology, noting that works on the two subjects often do not intermix, usually speaking to separate audiences in different ways. Another key text is Jennifer Craik’s 2005 book ‘Uniforms Exposed: from Conformity to Transgression’ which pursues the concept of the uniform as a motif that links with various themes like work, leisure, authority and culture. It calls on extensive theoretical underpinnings to establish a sociological framework for approaching any and all forms of uniform. Craik’s contribution stresses interdisciplinarity and the networked power of dress to underpin political reality. Concepts rooted in theory such as ‘techniques of the body’ are foregrounded in this study and these haptic approaches are a way to emphasise the power of an embodied approach to capture the host of factors that act through dress.[6] Elizabeth Wilson’s ‘Adorned in Dreams’ is a foundational text in the field and establishes groundwork on the subject of fashion and modernity. Published in 1985, in a transformative period for fashion studies, and still a benchmark, Wilson approaches the subject with a blend of chronological and thematic groupings, and builds on the core texts of mid-century fashion studies while breaking new analytic ground. It is intensely critical of other approaches to fashion but still suffers from the defensiveness common to much fashion writing, whereby it emphasises the subject as more of a special case rather than an integrated, fluid and vital part of everyone’s lives.[7] Caroline Evans’ ‘Fashion at the Edge’ is perhaps alongside Wilson in terms of impact upon theory-heavy fashion studies.[8] It is an example of a visually-rich study with a glamourous fashion-industrial focus that highlights the art historical aspects of high fashion, looking more like a coffee table book, in a form that re-asserts the value of communicating about fashion in a vernacular that flows out of fashion as creative practice, rather than seeking legitimacy purely through the rigours of traditional plain text. It would be impossible to explore the embodied aspects of fashion without Joanne Entwistle’s ‘The Fashioned Body’ (2000). It operates as a deep dive into the fashion-relevant aspects of Twentieth Century social theory, and is valuable as a survey of these concepts while contributing an original emphasis on fashionable embodiment.[9] While I do build upon the standard theorists, I also hope to move beyond absolute dependency on traditional forms of theorising by engaging with a more independent mode of analysis that allows fashion practice to operate as its own body of knowledge production. The texts from Tortora, Craik, Wilson, Evans, and Entwistle are foundational contributions to the canon of fashion theory writing. More focused studies with specific subject and methodological relevance to the topic of historic sports- and leisure-wear are well represented by Radu Stern’s ‘Against Fashion’ and Ulrich Lehmann’s ‘Tigersprung’. Stern presents a series of primary source texts on the subject of radical avant-garde anti-commercial dress, focusing on aesthetic dress of the late Nineteenth Century, Russian Constructivist experiments and Futurist manifestos for dress.[10] It is comparatively well illustrated and provides valuable straight-from-the-source readings alongside brief analysis. Ulrich Lehmann’s ‘Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity’ presents a history of fashion at the height of modernity through a literary and theory-influenced history of ideas. Each chapter pairs a thinker, writer or school of thought (including Benjamin, Baudelaire and Simmel) with corresponding developments in fashion, and while, as with Stern’s work and many studies like it, it risks placing the activities of an artistic elite in the centre, over the reality of wider society and critical questions of class and practice in intellectual history, this approach contributes a vital intermixing of dress history and the history of ideas.[11] The catalogue of the FIDM museum’s exhibition ‘Sporting Fashion: Outdoor Girls 1800-1960’, a large coffee-table-style book, contains high-quality mounted display photography, creatively staged and colourfully formatted. It is encyclopaedic in character and scope, and a close relative of this study, temporal and methodologically.[12]

The formative methodology of this project has been the principle of object study, and objects, as case studies, are then bolstered and explored through visual sources including museum reference collections and fashion, sports and lifestyle ephemeral imagery. Other facets – history, philosophy, literature, film – then spool out from this central process. Theorists who feature, but, instead of shaping the overall approach literally, become more relevant in close inspection, interrelating closely with particular aspects, include: Nietzsche, in his roving sloganeering as a poster boy for modernist degeneration, his energetic supremacist idealism (fomented alongside the fin-de-siècle sporting zeitgeist) and his collage-oriented textual outbursts; and Coomaraswamy, in his study of symbolism in culture from technology to folklore, particularly the wheel as a cosmic cycle and essential symbol, and his assertion of the abstract as being an outgrowth of the concrete and the image being the essential expression of philosophy: circles within circles.[13] By also plotting this work’s production process in grids, lists and granular search terms, it is hoped that a mapping-interplay occurs between Deleuze & Guattari’s smooth and striated space – expressing the simultaneity of the montaged, recorded world of the photographic and data-driven grid as it enfolds and intertwines with the curling fronds of cyclical abundance and decay, memory and forgetting, of the fashion sphere.[14] Some neologisms:

Auto-archiving: affirming individual authority over the historic record in effusive selection, or not. Programmatic cataloguing: making a list in an order of your own choosing, within/out new rules.

Digital collage: domestic, utilitarian and composed of elimination. A frame for roving network fuzz.

Generative Fashion Design Theory: Practice-based elaborate simplicity, mystical hybrid visual-verbal gothic vernacular architecture; utilising captions and annotations in the mode of fashion magazines (where it’s at), price on application; Aby Warburg-esque emergent ordering systems; fashion models as totemic, symbolic icons; ascetic veneration of the improvised visual grammar of the moodboard.[15]

Photomontage’s emergent visual shock is necessitated by the subject of sporting modernity, as recognised by Dada and the Futurists; Jean Dubuffet’s layered, othered, scrapings and total-world systems, as in ‘The Busy Life’ (1953) and ‘Jardin d’émail’ (1974), are a perennial influence.[16]

Other references from the art sphere acting upon my work, and formative over the years, include process-based conceptual artists, especially those who concern themselves with coding-like methodologies and generative prompts for the purpose of inspiration and the defeat of cliché. Yoko Ono’s emphasis on the artistic practices of engagement and audience-led completion, especially in her book of instructions, ‘Grapefruit’ (1964) is especially relevant.[17] John Baldessari also factors in, his influence can be seen in the disjointed, sub-metadata framing of the three captions that accompany each triptych, twists on the museum tombstone label, which give no direct information about the work whatsoever, only a cryptic sidebar.[18] Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, working as a deck of cards, game-like and oriented around active engagement with creative production, are a long-time source of process-based inspiration.[19] John Cage’s investigations into chance-based processes, especially his use of the I Ching, are present in the work, if only as a ghostly shadow.[20]

I have produced many works in the past that explored the potential of chance, randomisation and open-ended play as a means of producing work that is consciously positioned as an experimental, generative ‘first-draft’, a sketch-like, fast means of working and capturing both current trends and potential future combinations in fashionable cultural practices on an open field of play, contributions to the game of dressing. One piece was a digital print of a randomly selected fashion advert, blown up and sliced along the lines present in the image. These random pieces became the panels of a potential garment, with ribbons placed at the edges, again randomly, which could be tied around the body to create an open-ended, constantly shifting garment. Another, more grid-like, was a re-purposed sari with ribbons attached in rows along its length and breadth. The silk could be attached to the body in any way the wearer liked, an update on classical fashion. Another series of works were textual cut-ups: horoscopes were culled from fashion magazines, the activities suggested within were replaced with descriptions found in the captions of fashion editorials; rather than working on relationships or succeeding in their career, the reader was subject to the whims of dress, a green jacket might be anticipated for the end of the month, or a pair of shoes might play a pivotal role in a new appreciation for decisive action.[21]

While my experiments with randomised processes form a major backbone in my past work, its influence upon the current outcome is subtle: I have emphasised choice, composition and intent to a degree heretofore unseen in my creative work. This is mostly due to context and subject: the questions of supremacism, athletics, the winning mentality, and the triumph of individual will in the pursuit of excellence, seemed to demand focused, formal commitment. I selected each image intentionally for its ability to convey these principles, and arranged each layer according to a grid, where success was at the top and risk of failure, or downsides, were at the bottom. When I cut through each layer, museum objects opening onto into sports history, and sports and museums exposing a foundation of fashion and pop culture, some chance combinations occurred, but many back-and-forth decisions undercut the ‘scratch card’ aspects: I wanted to ‘win’, with a beautiful composition, so this work is notable amongst the body of my past work for its insistence on a particular way of working, a Nietzschean ‘will to power’, that forced my perspective through all the layers, letting chance remain on the backfoot, yet undeniably ever-present.

Moodboards occupy a strange role in both the fashion industry and dispersed fashion practices among ordinary people. While promoted as a core process in developing fashion collections, moodboards are rarely seen outside of the intimacy of the studio, and when put on display, for example backstage at a fashion show, are considered promotional imagery and produced in a separate process, after the design development stage.[22] This mirrors the contemporary life of the fashion illustration in its present decorative emphasis. A more realistic expression of research imagery in the design process can be seen in Dior & I, the documentary produced to capture Raf Simons’ first season as Creative Director at Dior. Simons is seen leafing through ring-binders of historic imagery, compiled by his team.[23] Often, these images will be produced loose-leaf so that they can be re-applied and re-mixed with ease, pinned on boards or placed together while under consideration. This more pragmatic approach to image and trend research emphasises the fluidity of fashion’s development process. The more personal approach to mooodboarding reflects this: individual fashion practitioners, often femmes and girls, actively engaging in shopping and personal dress, will compile inspirational imagery with the help of internet content: images might be combined through platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, or Tumblr, and/or kept in folders in their personal devices as screen grabs. A notable practitioner of this on-the-ground method of trend research is the supermodel Bella Hadid: in an interview with Vogue, it is noted she ‘loves to make Keynote decks of the images that inspire her, and she makes them almost compulsively.’[24] Hadid has continued in this passionate, daily practice of making her way through the digital landscape, gathering information for her personal inspiration along the way, into her corporate activities, producing image-focussed presentations on a variety of topics for her colleagues, saying ‘I am the self-proclaimed ‘deck human’ of the business.’[25]

This incorporation of inspirational imagery into working practices and daily habits, in the life of Hadid and the many fashion producers who share her values, in slide decks and the private non-commercial brands of social media spaces, reflects the conscious choices and inspired interruptions that constitute what Michel de Certeau theorises as ‘the practice of everyday life’; in his book of this title, de Certeau emphasises the conscious ways we move through public spaces as tactics that allow us to reclaim autonomy and private meaning in social and physical milieus that are often heavily commercialized.[26] This emphasis on the individual’s ability to re-make their environment through thoughtful re-purposing of ordinary choices is also present in the work of Georges Perec, who as an archivist and puzzle-designer, has been hugely influential upon not just my creative work but overall attitude to life, as I also work in medical archives with cataloguing metadata, using archival material as both the stuff of rent-paying and inspiration for creative endeavours. As a member of Oulipo, Perec explored the potential of programmatic generative constraints upon literary work, bringing in the principles of mathematics, computer science and systems thinking into the literary form as a tool for life. For Perec the ultimate form of this was the daily newspaper crossword; his novel ‘A Void’, written without the letter E, expresses the constraints that run through his life and work, and expresses the Oulipo movement’s concern with combining ‘the madness of the mathematician with the reasons of the poet’ through surrealist-adjacent structural experimentation.[27] His fascination with rules and games extended to a pre-occupation with the constraints of everyday life, he utilised techniques of

classifying and schematising places and objects (such as alternative methods for the ‘art and manner of arranging one’s books’) – and he compiled lists. These ranged from a catalogue of all the different beds in which he had slept, to a detailed description of the evolution of the Rue Vilin over a 12 year period, and his notorious ‘Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four’.[28]

The Surrealist thread in the work of Perec is present in mine too, and although it has been a very long time since I practiced any automatic writing, much of my daily creative practice is automatic and habitual. I prioritise observation and ego-free collation, trying to turn off my discernment and bias at the research stage, which expresses many of the professional principles of archival science (the ‘respect de fonds’ being a core principle alongside ‘original order’, an anti-curatorial, public service-oriented stance). Considering fashion as a practice of daily life, incorporating art references but not actually working as art, I habitually collect imagery that I consider to be expressive of ‘the moment’, whatever it may be, but with especial interest in the ephemeral and that which might best express the qualities of a particular moment in time that might be forgotten, the easily-ignored detritus of commercial activity. For me, the fashion-process has innate value in its mindlessness, operating through the subconscious and in disposable objects and things, mattering because it does not matter.

Fashion’s value as a process that does not really matter is essential to the argument made by Gilles Lipovetsky in ‘The Empire of Fashion’.[29] For Lipovetsky, fashion is an essential social technology of modernity because it abstracts and de-pressurises social relationships: by making clothing and identity more easily-exchanged and imitated, it encourages ease of movement between group and individual, allowing people to engage in playful, low-stakes experimentation with social identity. As a low-stakes endeavour, it makes life more meaningless, and facilitates large-scale urban social relations by making choices more light-hearted. For Lipovetsky, the silliness is the point, and fashion’s looseness becomes an essential grease for the modern, urban social machine, without which it would grind to a halt. This serious requirement of light-hearted play is also the central argument of Johan Huizinga in ‘Homo Ludens’, a foundational text in the study of sports.[30] Huizinga emphasises the contradiction in play: that it is simultaneously silly, meaningless and something people become utterly enthralled by, sinking effort and passion into it with complete seriousness. Such seriousness is only achievable in a specific area, the field of play, in which all the players know they are playing and can commit to the performance of another, dreamlike reality. For Huizinga, the social utility of the field of play extends all the way to traditional warfare and sacred ritual, both of which satisfy his definition of play as free and voluntary and beholden only unto itself, defying logic and rationality. Huizinga also contrasts the playful attributes of modern fashion and professional sports. In contemporary, formal sporting competitions, for Huizinga, the play element is lost as it becomes almost socially enforced by the commercial sphere. The stakes become too high. But fashion, in his conception, maintains the essential sporting qualities of lightness and make-believe. Everyone knows fashion doesn’t really matter, and this allows it to be free and playful. But sports have become industry by another means, and are no longer silly enough to express the importance of play.[31] For Huizinga, play is aesthetic, rhythmic, and ordered, and the fashion for wigs in the early modern period of European fashion is a heightened example of fashion’s innate playfulness. Sports and fashion, at their best, are both ordered, cyclical, light-hearted and expressive of simultaneity of the formal and the informal, the serious and the silly. Rules are obsessed over and discarded or updated, the field of play is an arena for stress-relief and experimental identity formation; winners and losers are made, with consequences both important and faintly ridiculous. In play, society can make in-group and out-group choices with serious real-world consequences, but only by committing to the idea that it doesn’t really matter. In many ways, sports are fashion, and fashion is a sport: both are play; by collapsing these supposedly very different social practices onto each other, I hope Podium has gone some way to point out the way that they interplay.

Collage

A Collage of Texts That, Now Collaged, Form a Textual Collage on the Subject of Collage:

‘We are moving from all work to all play, a deadly game.’[32]

‘Everything that could keep women from remaining seated was encouraged; anything that could have impeded their walking was avoided. They wore their hair and their clothes as thought they were to be viewed in profile. For the profile is the silhouette of someone … who passes, who is about to vanish from our sight. Dress became an image of the rapid movement that carries away the world.’[33]

‘The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a map, not a tracing. The orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp; it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real.’[34]

‘Around 1870 Colonal Delair notes: “Every fortress must possess a certain particular state, a certain power of resistance, which in men is called good health. In peacetime, we officers of the engineering corps are responsible for keeping the fortress in good health.” And a bit further on: “The art of defence must constantly be in transformation; it is not exempt from the general law of this world: stasis is death.”’[35]

‘Baudelaire can still write of “a book as dazzling as an Indian handkerchief or shawl.”’[36]

‘Napoleon expresses it clearly: “Aptitude for war is aptitude for movement,” and he specifies that one must evaluate the strength of the army “as in mechanics, by its mass multiplied by its speed.”’ [37]

‘Take William Burroughs cut-up method: the folding of one text onto another, which constitutes multiple and even adventitious roots (like cutting), implies a supplementary dimension to that of the text under consideration. In this supplementary dimension of folding, unity continues its spiritual labour. That is why the most resolutely fragmented work can also be presented as the Total Work or Magnum Opus.’[38]

‘The fleet in being is logistics taking strategy to its absolute point, as the art of movement of unseen bodies.’[39]

‘… all we know are assemblages. And the only assemblages are machinic assemblages of desire and collective assemblages of enunciation.’[40]

‘Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order.’[41]

‘The camera gave the moment a posthumous shock, as it were. Haptic experiences of this kind were joined by optic ones, such as are supplied by the advertising pages of a newspaper or the traffic of a big city. Moving through this traffic involves the individual in a series of shocks and collisions. At dangerous intersections, nervous impulses flow through him in rapid succession, like the energy from a battery. Baudelaire speaks of a man who plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of electric energy. Circumscribing the experience of the shock, he calls this man ‘a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness.’ Whereas Poe’s passers-by cast glances in all directions which still appeared to be aimless, today’s pedestrians are obliged to do so in order to keep abreast of traffic signals. Thus technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training.’[42]

‘Fashion stands in opposition to the organic. It couples the living body to the inorganic world. To the living, it defends the rights of the corpse. The fetishism that succumbs to the sex appeal of the inorganic is its vital nerve.’[43]

‘… not so much a grid made from a warp and weft but more a set of figural threads behaving as complexly as those in Morris’s wallpaper designs or rugs – splitting, entangling, nesting, crossing, curling – then it becomes a field of various speeds of experience. The threads do not suddenly petrify to form a small monument of knowing, at least not in the sense of a dimensional, Euclidean jump, they remain threads, forming nodes through entangling and crossing. As in the Gothic, and as with Semper, the mineralization cannot be separated from the actual continuation of the threads. In this sense, it is much more a looping of feeling and memory than a shifting from feeling to knowing.’[44]

‘Speed as pure idea without content comes from the sea like Venus, and when Marinetti cries that the universe has been enriched by a new beauty, the beauty of speed, and opposes the race car to the Winged Victory of Samothrace, he forgets that he is really talking about the same esthetic: the esthetic of the transport engine.’[45]

‘Focillon on the phantasmagoria of fashion: “most often… it creates hybrids; it imposes on the human being the profile of an animal…”’[46]

‘Speed has always been the advantage and the privilege of the hunter and the warrior. Racing and pursuit are the heart of all combat. There is thus a hierarchy of speeds to be found in the history of societies…’[47]

‘Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways: in this sense, the burrow is an animal rhizome.’[48]

‘When “the moon (a self-portrait)” reposes on fashionable velvet cushions instead of on clouds – and at such moments we first come to see that it is precisely in this century, the most parched and imagination-starved, that the collective dream energy of a society has taken refuge with redoubled vehemence in the mute impenetrable nebula of fashion, where the understanding cannot follow. Fashion is the predecessor – no, the eternal deputy – of Surrealism.’[49]

‘Given the necessities of military intelligence, men have made themselves the servants of energy, that is to say, of violence. Sun-worshipping is not particularly different from the worship of energy’s power on the part of modern technicians.’[50]

‘A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles.’[51]

‘… even though the nomadic trajectory may follow trails or customary routes, it does not fulfil the function of the sedentary road, which is to parcel out a closed space to people, assigning each person a share and regulating the communication between shares. The nomadic trajectory does the opposite, it distributes people (or animals) in an open space, one that is indefinite and noncommunicating.’[52]

‘In Freud’s view, consciousness as such receives no memory traces whatever, but has another important function: protection against stimuli. “For a living organism, protection against stimuli is an almost more important function than the reception of stimuli; the protective shield is equipped with its own store of energy and must above all strive to preserve the special forms of conversion of energy operating in it against the effects of the excessive energies at work in the external world, effects which tend towards an equalization of potential and hence toward destruction.” The threat from these energies is one of shocks. The more readily consciousness registers these shocks, the less likely they are to have a traumatic effect. Psychoanalytic theory strives to understand the nature of these traumatic shocks “on the basis of their breaking through the protective shield against stimuli.” According to this theory, fright has “significance” in the “absence of any preparedness for anxiety.”[53]

‘Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are totally useless questions. Making a clean slate, starting or beginning again from ground zero, seeking a beginning or a foundation – all imply a false conception of voyage and movement (a conception that is methodical, pedagogical, initiatory, symbolic…). But Kleist, Lenz, and Buchner have another way of traveling and moving: processing from the middle, through the middle, coming and going rather than starting and finishing. […] the middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed.’[54]

‘Salvation is no longer in flight; safety is in “running toward your death,” in “killing your death.” Safety is in the assault simply because the new ballistic vehicles make flight useless; they go faster and farther than the soldier, they catch up with him and pass him.’[55]

‘A kindred problem arose with the advent of new velocities, which gave life an altered rhythm. This latter, too, was first tried out, as it were, in a spirit of play. The loop-the-loop came on the scene, and Parisians seized on this entertainment with a frenzy. A chronicler notes around 1810 that a lady squandered 75 francs in one evening at the Parc de Montsouris, where at the time you could ride those looping cars.’[56]

‘For the philosopher, the most interesting thing about fashion is its extraordinary anticipations. It is well known that art will often – for example, in pictures – precede the perceptible reality by years. […] yet fashion is in much steadier, much more precise contact with the coming thing, thanks to the incomparable nose which the feminine collective has for what lies waiting in the future. Each season brings, in its newest creations, various secret signals of things to come. Whoever understands how to read these semaphores would know in advance not only about new currents in the arts but also about new legal codes, wars, and revolutions.’[57]

‘…the question is: why does a mandrill, a bower bird, or any animal with a patterned coat make use of such elaborate rituals, extensive formalities and delicate indirectness? For a Ruskinian, the question could not be easier to answer: aesthetics is primary. For the world to work, it must rely on aesthetics. Relations cannot simply be utilitarian and functionalist, like plumbing, and physically, physiologically, or mechanically direct. Everything must take a detour… nothing is so dedicated to artificiality as an animal. Why is everything so excessively dressed up? The Darwinian answer – so the dress can be taken off – is a complete reversal of the facts. The much bigger question, of course, is: why on Earth is there so much beauty?’[58]

‘In my formulation: The eternal is in any case far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea.’[59]

References

Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, (Cambridge; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002)

Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken Books, 1969)

Carmines Mooney, Katherine, Race Horse Men: How Slavery and Freedom Were Made at the Racetrack (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014)

de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011)

Coomaraswamy, Ananda Kentish, Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art, (New York: Dover Publications, 1956)

Coomaraswamy, Ananda Kentish, The Transformation of Nature in Art, (New York: Angelico Press, 2016)

Couturier, Myriam, ‘Fashion on the Road (1870-1915): The Linen Duster Paradox’, Costume, 56.1 (2022), 3-25

Craik, Jennifer, Uniforms Exposed: From Conformity to Transgression, (London: Bloomsbury, 2005)

Dazed, Bella Hadid and the Boardroomification of Celebrity (2022), < https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/55212/1/bella-hadid-and-the-boardroomification-of-celebrity-kin-euphorics-interview >, [accessed 24 April 2024]

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix, Nomadology: The War Machine, (South Pasadena, California: Semiotext(e), 1986)

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix, A Thousand Plateaus, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013)

Dizikes, John, Yankee Doodle Dandy: The Life and Times of Tod Sloan, (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2000)

Entwistle, Joanne, The Fashioned Body, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000)

Evans, Caroline, Fashion at the Edge, (London, Yale University Press, 2003)

Frieze, Georges Perec: A User’s Manual: Georges Perec and the Oulipians (2000), < https://www.frieze.com/article/georges-perec-users-maual >, [accessed 24 April 2024]

Getty, Search: Moodboard Backstage (2024), < https://www.gettyimages.no/search/2/image?family=editorial&phrase=moodboard%20backstage&sort=best >, [accessed 24 April 2024]

Haraway, Donna J., Manifestly Haraway, (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2016)

Haraway, Donna J., Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2016)

Hobsbawm, Eric, Industry and Empire, (London: Penguin, 1990)

Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Capital 1848-1875, (London: Abacus, 1997)

Huggins, Mike, Flat Racing and British Society 1790-1914: A Social and Economic History (London: Frank Cass Publishing, 2000)

Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, (New York: Angelico Press, 2016)

Johnson, Christina M, & Jones, Kevin L, Sporting Fashion: Outdoor Girls 1800 to 1960, (London: Prestel, 2021)

Kröller-Müller Museum, Jardin d’émail (1974), < https://krollermuller.nl/en/jean-dubuffet-jardin-d-email > [accessed 24 April 2024]

Lehmann, Ulrich, Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity, (Cambridge: MIT Press: 2000)

Lipovetsky, Gilles, The Empire of Fashion, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)

Lugli, Emanuele, The Making of Measure and the Promise of Sameness, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019)

Maddock, Rosannagh, Design (2024), < https://rosannaghmaddock.co.uk/design/ > [accessed 24 April 2024]

Maddock, Rosannagh, Podium (2024), < https://rosannaghmaddock.co.uk/podium/ >, [accessed 24 April 2024]

Maddock, Rosannagh, Podium Project (2024), < https://podiumproject.tumblr.com/ >, [accessed 24 April 2024]

MoMA, Dada (2024), < https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/dadaMoMa > [accessed 24 April 2024]

MoMA, Brian Eno (2024), < https://www.moma.org/artists/38770 >, [accessed 24 April 2024]

MoMA, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (2024), < https://www.moma.org/artists/3771 > [accessed 24 April 2024]

MoMA, John Baldessari (2024), < https://www.moma.org/artists/304 >, [accessed 24 April 2024]

MoMA, John Cage (2024), < https://www.moma.org/artists/912 >, [accessed 24 April 2024]

MoMA, Yoko Ono (2024), < https://www.moma.org/artists/4410 >, [accessed 24 April 2024].

Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (London: Penguin Classics, 1974)

Perec, Georges, A Void, (London: Vintage Classics, 2008)

Prideaux, Sue, I am Dynamite!: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche, (London: Faber & Faber, 2018)

Ratner-Rosenhagen, Jennifer, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and his Ideas, (London, University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Showalter, Elaine, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture in the Fin de Siècle, (London: Virago, 1990)

Spuybroek, Lars, The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of Design, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016)

Stern, Radu, Against Fashion, (Cambridge: MIT Press: 2004)

Tate, Artists: Jean Dubuffet (2024), < https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/jean-dubuffet-1035 > [accessed 24 April 2024]

Tcheng, Frédéric, Dior & I, (CIM Productions, 2015)

Tortora, Phyllis G, Dress, Fashion and Technology: from prehistory to the present (London: Bloomsbury, 2015)

Vogue, Bella From the Heart: On Health Struggles, Happiness, and Everything In Between (2022), < https://www.vogue.com/article/bella-hadid-cover-april-2022 > , [accessed 24 April 2024]

Virilio, Paul, Polar Inertia, (London: Sage, 1999)

Virilio, Paul, Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology, (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986)

Virilio, Paul, The Virilio Reader, ed. James Der Derian, (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998)

Warburg Institute, The, History of The Warburg Institute (2024), < https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/about-us/history-warburg-institute > [accessed 24 April 2024]

Wilson, Elizabeth, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, (London: Virago, 1985)

Captions

Gold:

Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (London: Penguin Classics, 1974)

Prideaux, Sue, I am Dynamite!: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche, (London: Faber & Faber, 2018)

Ratner-Rosenhagen, Jennifer, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and his Ideas, (London, University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Silver:

Dizikes, John, Yankee Doodle Dandy: The Life and Times of Tod Sloan, (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2000)

Bronze:

Hobsbawm, Eric, Industry and Empire, (London: Penguin, 1990)

Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Capital 1848-1875, (London: Abacus, 1997)

Lugli, Emanuele, The Making of Measure and the Promise of Sameness, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019)

Figures

Podium: All images created by Rosannagh Maddock, 2024.

Case studies, visual examples:

Walking dress (as worn by Lou Salomé):

Prideaux, Sue, I am Dynamite!: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche, (London: Faber & Faber, 2018)

Jockey silks (as worn by Tod Sloan):

Museum of the City of New York, Portrait, Tod Sloan (Jockey) on His Return from Europe, 1898, MNY35349, < https://collections.mcny.org/CS.aspx?VP3=DamView&VBID=24UP1GQ0LVB8H&SMLS=1&RW=1276&RH=760 >, [accessed 24 April 2024]

Duster coat (as worn by Georges Bouton):

Dyler, De Dion-Bouton: The First European Manufacturer of Series Cars (2022), < https://dyler.com/blog/425/de-dion-bouton-the-first-european-manufacturer-of-series-cars >, [accessed 24 April 2024]

Footnotes:

[1] Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture in the Fin de Siècle, (London: Virago, 1990).

[2] Katherine Carmines Mooney, Race Horse Men: How Slavery and Freedom Were Made at the Racetrack (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014); Mike Huggins, Flat Racing and British Society 1790-1914: A Social and Economic History (London: Frank Cass Publishing, 2000).

[3] Myriam Couturier, ‘Fashion on the Road (1870-1915): The Linen Duster Paradox’, Costume, 56.1 (2022), 3-25.

[4] Rosannagh Maddock, Podium Project (2024), < https://podiumproject.tumblr.com/ >, [accessed 24 April 2024]; Rosannagh Maddock, Podium (2024), < https://rosannaghmaddock.co.uk/podium/ >, [accessed 24 April 2024].

[5] Phyllis G Tortora, Dress, Fashion and Technology: from prehistory to the present (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

[6] Jennifer Craik, Uniforms Exposed: From Conformity to Transgression, (London: Bloomsbury, 2005).

[7] Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, (London: Virago, 1985).

[8] Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge, (London, Yale University Press, 2003).

[9] Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).

[10] Radu Stern, Against Fashion, (Cambridge: MIT Press: 2004).

[11] Ulrich Lehmann, Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity, (Cambridge: MIT Press: 2000).

[12] Christina Johnson & Kevin Jones, Sporting Fashion: Outdoor Girls 1800 to 1960, (London: Prestel, 2021).

[13] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (London: Penguin Classics, 1974); Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art, (New York: Dover Publications, 1956); Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, The Transformation of Nature in Art, (New York: Angelico Press, 2016).

[14] Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).

[15] The Warburg Institute, History of The Warburg Institute (2024), < https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/about-us/history-warburg-institute > [accessed 24 April 2024].

[16] MoMA, Dada (2024), < https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/dada > [accessed 24 April 2024]; MoMA, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (2024), < https://www.moma.org/artists/3771 > [accessed 24 April 2024]; Tate, Artists: Jean Dubuffet (2024), < https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/jean-dubuffet-1035 > [accessed 24 April 2024]; Kröller-Müller Museum, Jardin d’émail (1974), < https://krollermuller.nl/en/jean-dubuffet-jardin-d-email > [accessed 24 April 2024].

[17] MoMA, Yoko Ono (2024), < https://www.moma.org/artists/4410 >, [accessed 24 April 2024].

[18] MoMA, John Baldessari (2024), < https://www.moma.org/artists/304 >, [accessed 24 April 2024].

[19] MoMA, Brian Eno (2024), < https://www.moma.org/artists/38770 >, [accessed 24 April 2024].

[20] MoMA, John Cage (2024), < https://www.moma.org/artists/912 >, [accessed 24 April 2024].

[21] Rosannagh Maddock, Design (2024), < https://rosannaghmaddock.co.uk/design/ >, [accessed 24 April 2024].

[22] Getty Images, Search: Moodboard Backstage (2024), < https://www.gettyimages.no/search/2/image?family=editorial&phrase=moodboard%20backstage&sort=best >, [accessed 24 April 2024].

[23] Dior & I, dir. by Frédéric Tcheng, (CIM Productions, 2015).

[24] Vogue, Bella From the Heart: On Health Struggles, Happiness, and Everything In Between (2022), < https://www.vogue.com/article/bella-hadid-cover-april-2022 >, [accessed 24 April 2024].

[25] Dazed, Bella Hadid and the Boardroomification of Celebrity (2022), < https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/55212/1/bella-hadid-and-the-boardroomification-of-celebrity-kin-euphorics-interview >, [accessed 24 April 2024].

[26] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

[27] Georges Perec, A Void, (London: Vintage Classics, 2008).

[28] Frieze, Georges Perec: A User’s Manual: Georges Perec and the Oulipians (2000), < https://www.frieze.com/article/georges-perec-users-maual >, [accessed 24 April 2024].

[29] Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

[30] Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, (New York: Angelico Press, 2016).

[31] Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, (New York: Angelico Press, 2016), p. 199.

[32] Donna Haraway, Manifestly Haraway, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), p 28.

[33] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, (Cambridge; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 74.

[34] Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 12.

[35] Paul Virilio, Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology, (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986), p. 13.

[36] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, (Cambridge; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 58.

[37] Paul Virilio, Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology, (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986), p. 22.

[38] Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 4.

[39] Paul Virilio, Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology, (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986), p. 38.

[40] Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 24.

[41] Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), pp.5-6.

[42] Benjamin, pp. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp.174-175.

[43] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, (Cambridge; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 8.

[44] Lars Spuybroek, The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of Design, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), p. 115.

[45] Paul Virilio, Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology, (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986), p. 45.

[46] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, (Cambridge; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 80.

[47] Paul Virilio, The Virilio Reader, ed. By James Der Derian, (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998), p. 24.

[48] Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 12.

[49] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, (Cambridge; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 64.

[50] Paul Virilio, The Virilio Reader, ed. By James Der Derian, (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998), p. 25.

[51] Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 6.

[52] Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 189.

[53] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 161.

[54] Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 27.

[55] Paul Virilio, Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology, (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986), p. 22.

[56] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, (Cambridge; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 65.

[57] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, (Cambridge; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 63-64.

[58] Lars Spuybroek, The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of Design, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), p. 225.

[59] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, (Cambridge; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 69.