Six Illuminated Videos

Abstract

training, competition, and performance in martial arts provide a stage where practitioners’ minds and bodies are continually revised, laying bare the techniques, processes, negotiations, and experiences involved in making and remaking the fighter’s self. through years of training and competition in enshin Karate, a bareknuckle, knockdown-rules karate style, the author’s body—including muscle, bone, skin, coordination, and perception—has changed to fit the art and the sport. sensory shifts are among the most striking of these changes. in the most chaotic and high-pressure moments of training and competition, an experienced fighter may seem to feel sound or hear pain, shifting distracting, demoralizing, or damaging sensory phenomena to another mode better equipped to maintain performance in the moment. sound has come to take on an important haptic and anesthetic role in the author’s martial arts practice. this article shares video taken of the final two of 100 shadowboxing rounds completed in a single session and discusses how this video relates to the author’s direct sensory experience. Years of hard training and high-pressure competition can alter even the perceptive schema and sensory hierarchies that otherwise appear fundamental to our experience, and this video article represents an early step in the exploration of the limits of that directed self-modification. the author describes how, over the course of 100 rounds, sound begins to dominate his sensory experience. this article also demonstrates the potential for sound to cut across forms and media of memory, anchoring and uniting seemingly disjunct representations into an intelligible, if still contradictory, whole. the cultivated reconfiguration of the senses through experience with sites of extreme sensation has profound implications for the understanding of sound’s role in embodiment, complicating and potentially extending everyday understandings of the body’s limits and the limits of self-modification. Analysis of the disjunctures and connections between organically housed personal memory, associated with direct sensory experience, and digitally housed media representing the same phenomenon illuminates the role of particular phenomena—in this case sound—that may otherwise be understood as secondary to the visual in connecting these seemingly divergent mnemonics.