If Didier Drogba represents the image of a contemporary African hero on the global stage then who or what does Senegalese striker El Hadji Diouf represent?
Meet Digital Diouf. David Kilpatrick’s intriguing post in the New York Times GOAL blog tells us about “We Tripped El Hadji Diouf: The Story of a Photoshop Thread,” a recent exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.
The story is about the intersection of sport, art, and digital technology. At the heart of it is a three-second clip of Diouf (at Rangers) sent flying by Hearts midfielder Ian Black’s tackle. The video was photoshopped and then posted on SomethingAwful.com, where users imaginatively molded it into extraordinarily creative and wide-ranging videos. Eventually, 35 of the videos were looped together and displayed at the Museum of the Moving Image.
“While many of the images embrace Diouf’s agony as some kind of karmic retribution for his villainy,” Kilpatrick writes, “others allow technology to revise the outcome and provide a happy ending.” Rumor has it that Dakar’s digital griots are planning a sequel.
Tag: New York Times
Melissa Block of NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’ interviewed me about soccer’s long history in Africa. Soccer was brought to Africa by British colonials in the mid-1800s. The first documented game on the continent was played in South Africa in 1862, a year before soccer’s official rules were codified. As I argue in African Soccerscapes, soccer has been an important sport in Africa for as long as it was played in Europe.
Click here to listen to the interview and read a transcript.
Was also interviewed by and quoted in this New York Times article: Soccer Returns to its Roots in Africa
