'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.

Wimbledon, like many social rituals, is a massive and ongoing cultural construction. But for decades now, the tournament has painstakingly cultivated an image of itself with the naturalistic “tennis in an English garden” branding ideal. Longtime CEO Chris Gorringe was instrumental in shaping Wimbledon’s public perception this way (see his spunky 2010 memoir). The overt goal was to be covert: paint a picture of an easygoing, timeless tradition that asks little of spectators but provides much — essentially creating a user-friendly interface that veils the gathering’s formidable labor, infrastructure, and underlying technology.

In science-and-technology studies, we often call this “black boxing,” which Bruno Latour described as “the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success.” That doesn’t so much mean commercial success; rather, Latour is implying a successful kind of masquerade, an invisibility that’s increasingly key to social encounters with entertaining and surveilling technologies — even though those wielding the technologies often strive to balance the objective veiling of their apparatus with a subjective desire to show off its marvels.

This has been evident throughout my historical and ethnographic studies of traditional and digital holograms, back to the development of the Pepper’s Ghost stage illusion. In its original analog design, projecting ghosts as visual aids for scientific demonstrations in Victorian London, or in its 21st-century iteration (with minimal digital tweaks) resurrecting rapper Tupac Shakur at Coachella, the success of this illusion system depends utterly on the invisibility of its apparatus — hiding the image source, making sure the frame of the screen is out of sight, etc. We’re supposed to marvel at the constructed imagery, not the machine presenting it. The encounter is purposely idolatrous.
 
Wimbledon's tech-forward posturing walks the same path just off Church Road. We’re supposed to admire the flowers, relax on The Hill, and savor strawberries and Pimm’s without bumping directly into the hardware underpinning it all. That’s quite a feat, given that lurking beneath the event’s traditional facade is a sophisticated technological complex producing an increasingly industrial social spectacle, which these ads revel in revealing for our (modern) astonishment and (marketing) appreciation.

• For instance, while we sit and watch the volleys in the stands or at home, the action is also viewed by more than 120 broadcast cameras hidden throughout the grounds — in courtside duck blinds and overhead rafters, all serviced by a hundred miles of cable — feeding an electronic viewing audience sometimes approaching a billion people.
  
• The on-court movement of the players and the balls is tracked by a bevy of special cameras, capturing data in order to feed continually mounting match statistics, as well as assisting judges with occasional line calls.
  
• Other sensors are concealed throughout the grounds: in the roof to track humidity, around the seats listening to crowd reactions, and even in or on players' rackets to analyze swing mechanics and ball behavior.

Much of this data is made available to fans in real time, and an archive of player stats reaches back to 1877, allowing for all manner of historical perspectives on match play for fans, players, and coaches. 

A few of the ads celebrating this invisible presence use animations revealing — a la The Matrix or They Live — a camouflaged assemblage of monitoring media (including one, pictured above, that pinpoints the location of court cameras in a dome shape that looks remarkably like the Light Stage array used to create some digital holograms). In one ad, Wimbledon officials assure us that all this data collection is “done invisibly” and that none of the tech’s presence wields a negative “impact on the game.” In another video, it’s explained that “we hide as much of the technology as we can. It’s about being able to stay true to our original idea of tennis in an English garden.” The underlying assumption in these statements is that if the technology were a visible presence around the courts, then the essential aura and constructed magic around the event would be ruined. Imagery in some of the ads shows the tournament’s hive for all this data collection, a “dark bunker” safely buried under the stands in which producers labor to feed scores and stats throughout the complex as well as to the networked viewership. AI systems now digest the data streams, too — not just crunching numbers but listening to the crowd’s cheers and gasps, even analyzing facial recognition for players’ emotions — allowing producers to deliver punchy highlight reels within seconds of a set’s completion. Granted, it’s pretty impressive (and, frankly, helpful) when the choicest highlights roll us swiftly into a commercial.
 
The architect of Pepper’s Ghost, John Henry Pepper, developed his namesake illusion in the 1860s with a parallel goal — eating and having his cake by entertaining audiences (with a seemingly supernatural spectacle) but also then explaining the utterly technical means of its production. His intent was to further an Enlightenment discourse of demystification: the idea that the knowledge produced through superior technoscience would eradicate irrational superstition from society. Instead of an epistemic exorcism, however, Pepper’s Ghost merely participated in resituating the experience of the spiritual from one of supernatural manifestation to one of technical conveyance. The concept of a haunting ghost merely transferred from the razzle-dazzle of the spiritualist’s séance to the tech bro’s interface. It was OK to experience fright and awe in the context of magic and showmanship, but if you really wanted to be a modern citizen you had to see through the specter and at least glimpse the miraculous and modern technocraft producing its wondrous communion. These contemporary videos accomplish something similar, allowing viewers to marvel at the technology shown on screen while remaining largely untroubled by its material presence. 

In 2019, though, IBM and Wimbledon elevated this performance of reality augmentation. As British icon Monty Don would be quick to remind us, the very idea of gardening itself indexes a human practice meant to make the carefully constructed appear utterly natural. (Even Wimbledon’s iconic grass requires extraordinary maintenance and continual reconstruction.) The two corporations doubled down on the “tennis in an English garden” ideal by creating the IBM Technology Garden: a small patch on site planted with actual flowers near a wall, on which hung a digital display depicting animated imagery of flowers — imagery that morphed and evolved based on the input of the tournament’s player-performance data stream. (This fits into an emerging genealogy of other data-responsive art installations, such as the work of Refik Anadol.) In the video above, IBM describes its Wimbledon exhibit as “an artistic manifestation of moments of greatness enabled by innovative technology,” producing “visual representations of IBM’s impact on the game, the fan-experience and global media.” Visitors to this spot were meant to “read, experience, and understand how IBM continues to bring The Championships to life through innovation” — a techno-spatial advertisement, of course, but not just for IBM itself. Here was a material performance of Wimbledon’s traditions, which include Enlightenment ideals about the sociotechnical control of nature, manifested within a mixed-reality site balancing traditional aesthetics with advanced technology.
 
By openly showcasing the depth and sophistication of its sensory and big-data technology in its marketing and public engagements, Wimbledon effectively redefines what is “natural” within its own context. Its discourse suggests that this seemingly effortless, traditional spectacle is not despite technology but because of it. This dual approach allows Wimbledon to remain deeply rooted in tradition while staying relevant and appealing to a modern, data-driven audience, essentially naturalizing the technological underpinnings as an integral, albeit hidden, part of the “garden” experience. This reliable pattern of making complex, engineered systems appear seamless, inherent, or even beautiful to the natural world — making technology an unacknowledged or celebrated enabler of the desired reality — resonates with historical efforts to integrate scientific and technical advancements into the perceived fabric of everyday life or desired spectacles.