Hitting Walls: Bounce and the Performance of Limits
An Art, Technology, & Culture Colloquium lecture
with Carlin Wing
Associate Professor, Media Studies, Scripps College
Media scholar and artist, Carlin Wing introduces her newly published book, Bounce, which follows an array of bouncing balls through the histories of electronic and nonelectronic games, across the spectrum of play, game, and sport, and into the domains of physics, material science, animation, and computing. Of the countless physical and digital games and sports that revolve around bounce, the book tracks the shift from ricochet in ancient tennis to the true bounce in the modern game; spotlights squash and stretch in animation as a mirror of ping and Pong in computing; and contrasts the bounce feel in the global blockbuster EA Sports FC (formerly FIFA) to the pok ta pok in the three thousand year old Mesoamerican ballgame. With these cases, Wing shows how bounce has been taken up in different historical moments and contexts as a technique for containing uncertainty, testing for truth, confirming identity, constructing character, coordinating interaction, and modeling physical motion.
Bounce emerged out of Hitting Walls, an iterative project consisting of works of photography, video, sound, performance, participatory workshops, and writing that all take ball-wall games as a point of departure for calling up the interweavings of global histories and everyday gestures. For this talk, Wing will situate the book in relation to the works in Hitting Walls and describe how her theorizing of bounce evolved over decades of playing, making, and writing about and around ball games.
About Carlin Wing
Carlin Wing is a media scholar, artist, and teacher. Her first book, Bounce: Balls, Walls, and Bodies in Gaming and Play (MIT 2026), follows an array of bouncing balls through the histories of electronic and nonelectronic games, across the spectrum of play, game, and sport, and into the domains of physics, material science, animation, and computing. Bounce is part of Hitting Walls, an ongoing iterative project that includes works made in a variety of media and forms—from large format photographs and experimental videos, to collaborative performances and participatory workshops. Wing has work exhibited nationally and internationally, is co-editor of The Techno-Galactic Guide to Software Observation and EA Sports FIFA: Feeling the Game, and has contributed writing to Public Books, Cabinet, Games and Culture, Racquet, and The Bulletin of the Serving Library. She is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at Scripps College.
About Art, Technology, & Culture Colloquium
Founded by Professor Ken Goldberg in 1997, the Arts, Technology & Culture lecture series at BCNM is an internationally respected forum for creative ideas. Always free of charge and open to the public, the series has presented over 200 leading artists, writers, and critical thinkers who question assumptions and push boundaries at the forefront of art, technology, and culture.
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