Watching irreversible real-time gestures is a rare and uniquely attention-grabbing experience

Evidence

If sport is so enthralling for some of us – to the great displeasure of the rationalist censors who denigrate as a distraction the concentration of our attention on twenty players chasing after a ball to send it between two posts – it is because it remains one of the rare spheres in which we can witness irreversible gestures in real time. Whatever the role played by preparation and the monotonous repetition of the same bodily gestures over the course of thousands of hours of training, performance is always a moment in which the gesture must exceed all the efforts of programming that made it possible. Because the body’s abilities are pushed to the extreme without our knowing when it will have gone too far (as in athletics), because it is not possible to predict an opponent’s reactions (as in tennis), because collective gestures are coordinated in real time, relying on the intuition of collaborators (as in football), sports fascinate our attention as they stage our relationship with time. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 293

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘gestural suspense’ principle could anchor an essay on why live sports and theater resist digital replacement despite on-demand availability.