'Tennis in an English garden': The AR of Wimbledon

The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha — which is to demean oneself.
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Each year in the run-up to Wimbledon, the annual sporting event works meticulously to frame itself as less of a cultural construction and more of a natural, pastoral ritual. But in recent years, joint advertisements for the British tennis tournament and its technological partner IBM have stepped up their game.

Repeating and retooling the descriptive phrase “tennis in an English garden,” these ads celebrate what makes Wimbledon, well, Wimbledon — the world-class tennis, the perfectly manicured grass, the quintessentially British charm— while also revealing and showing off a powerhouse of cutting-edge technology and astute business strategy beneath the surface. It's a fascinating paradox at play that makes for a potent case study of the augmentation of our everyday reality by ubiquitous computing — a garden that’s wired for sound, data, and global domination — in service of age-old Enlightenment ideologies.

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