Technology and sport

This is a day of poor judgments in soccer. Both of the World Cup matches today involved goal-related bad calls. Would England or Mexico have won if the referees' decisions were correct? Probably not. But it was disheartening to see injustice breaking the equilibrium and ruining the chemistry in the teams.

England vs. Germany, 38th minute. A shot by England's Frank Lampard hit
the crossbar and bounced half a meter into the goal. But it was disallowed.

Argentina vs. Mexico, 26th minute. Argentina's Carlos Tevez scored the
first goal of the game on a play that appeared offside from all angles live.

It's not the first time blown calls have happened in soccer. Now-coach Maradona's "Hand of God" goal in the 1986 World Cup quarter-final against England is a classic. What really bothered me today was FIFA's long resistance to technology. Instant replays showed the world the truth but the referees could still deny and their decisions stood. Refs are human beings, and human beings make mistakes. But does that mean we just have to embrace human imperfection as part of the game? Why don't we do something about it?

The relationship between technology and sport makes me think of swimming. To me, the ban of "sharkskin" swimsuits makes sense because the whole point of a race is to challenge the limit of what the human body can do. "Sharkskin" technology enhances the body and the result is in principle no different from a genetically altered creature. But when it comes to the literally "technical" aspects such as judgment accuracy and hard evidence, technology should be encouraged. I remember in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Michael Phelps won the men's 100m butterfly gold by 1/100 of a second. There's no way bare eyes could tell this. If technology brings us precision and justice, why not?

Public Playground 1

It's really moving! That's my first reaction when I walked towards PS1 and saw from the outside the swaying rods beyond the walls. When the renderings first came out, people started to question how much the poles can really move. As the design developed, SO-IL worked with structural engineer Buro Happold and decided to use windsurf tendon joints to allow maximum flexibility in all directions. It's exciting to see this really works and SO-IL has successfully delivered what they proposed within budget and schedule.


What SO-IL provided is a interactive instrument for people to play, rather than a finite form to look at. (Well, it is nice to look at too.) I saw people vigorously shaking the poles and causing waves on the net, taking their shoes off and jumping into the pool, or kicking balls in the sand pit as if on a beach. The indeterminate structure invites endless inventions of new games. Here, the architects have let loose the final product and become choreographers of situations, or literally, for pole dances.


In the smaller courtyard, the eight poles are equipped with accelerometers. The motions of the poles are measured and translated into tones specifically composed for the installation: rapid and shallow movements create locally oscillating tones, while large, tilting movements create ripples of sound throughout the courtyard. The installation engages the visitors to participate in rich sound experiments. And, there's also an app for that!

Chaos generated by chaos

I have to say the Starn twins' "Big Bambú" on the rooftop of the Met was a big disappointment. Thousands of interlocking bamboo poles are tied together with nylon rope, forming a vast and seemingly chaotic structure. I was trying to find some decipherable principles to grasp onto, but there's none.


It's interesting to see this in the process of writing the last post. If money amplifies people's unconscious emotional volatility, art is the venue where people deliberately exploit the irrational dimension of spontaneous actions. The so-called "moments of genius" provide a good excuse for random and unmindful practice. But is that really what creativity is about?

I'm not saying we should abandon intuition in the process of creation. But rigor is essential to any meaningful exploration. Big Bambú takes its inspiration from scaffolding in Asia, but what's the logic of scaffolding construction? Would the columns be hanging and not touching the ground? The piece is meant to resemble a cresting wave, but why can't I see signs of the underlying principles of hydrodynamics? Perhaps it's more exciting to experience through the elevated pathways. But if the pathways are supposed to work as urban arteries, do they have the same rationale as street layouts in cities? Maybe I am being a bit too harsh. All I want to say is, no matter how ingenious the gut feelings are, one still need some justifiable grounds to be truly creative. To put it in a banal way, there should be a balance between sense and sensibility.

Fat tails

Reading Niall Ferguson's narration on the history of finance, I saw many almost con-like well-planned inventions that have advanced the system of money to more sophisticated levels, and at the same time devastating moments of human spontaneity that shook our world with bubble bursts and crises. The stock markets, for example, are mirrors of an amplified tendency of overreacting. When prices start to go up, people rush to go in and buy more as if possessed by a collective euphoria - what Alan Greenspan called "irrational exuberance." But if any bad news surfaces, people can flip overnight from greed to fear, selling and withdrawing, causing a dramatic plunge on a global scale.

In statistics, the graph of a "normal distribution" looks like a classic bell curve, with higher probability clustered around the mean and fewer instances towards the extremes. Many natural and physical phenomena, such as human heights and laser light intensity, seem to follow this principle. But the movements of stock market prices are more results of human emotional volatility than rational science of "normal." Prices can surge up steeply one day, and drop with extreme abruptness the next. Statisticians call this distribution with higher likelihood at the extremes "fat tails."

Fat tails imply risks. Things can go extraordinarily well, or terribly wrong. And it's hard to predict. Today you have a winner, and tomorrow you could have a crisis. Impulsive decisions and mood swings push things to extremes, jumping inconsistently between one end to an other. It is almost impossible to understand or follow or react. That's why the rocket science of the Black-Scholes pricing model did not succeed. Maybe the only way to deal with subjective irrationality is guesswork, which by definition gives you 50% chance.

Some say stress or anxiety is the source of poor decisions. People under stress may swing between the poles of mania and depression, suffer from perceptual narrowing that prevents them from seeing the big picture, dramatize trivial happenings that should be expected normally, or even distort reality through denial and fabrication. Is there a way to pull the fat tails back to the mean? I would say: "Calm down."

Lively dead

Thursday night was the first time I went back to the Museum of Arts and Design since its opening. I went with good reasons. First it was a pay-what-you-wish night. And second, the current exhibition "Dead or Alive" is truly intriguing and amazing. It's the kind of exhibition that could have been held in Hogwarts. Here you see ginger roots, lotus leaves, millet seeds, kelp, feathers, horse hairs, various insects, cocoons, oyster shells, snake skin, and even a skeleton of a centaur.

Shen Shaomin, Sagittarius, 2005
Bone, bone meal, glue

It's not the first time artists have moved beyond conventional mediums like paint and marble, but it was quite impressive to see this collective endeavor of exploring materiality, or "matter-reality" of organic substance. Cuban-born artist Fabián Peña talked about his cockroach wing mosaics as "a material that I can easily find," and "it's cheaper than buying paint." Of course the choice of material is more than just pragmatics. It's a challenge of our views towards the repulsive creatures. I saw two girls observing with great interest a heap of something that artist Alastair Mackie put together. When they finally realized what they were looking at, they frowned, "Ew, mouse bones taken from owl poop? That's gross!" Why didn't they say that when they first saw the heap? Well... I guess what it is does matter more than how it looks.

Fabián Peña. The Impossibility of Storage for the Soul I, 2007
Cockroach wing fragments, translucent paper, light box

Alastair Mackie. Untitled (+/-), 2009 (part)
Mouse skeletons, concrete

Some pieces like that may be eerily chilling, but overall, there's a certain playful tone. Nothing is really as strikingly disturbing as Damien Hirst's bull's head in "End of an Era." (He's actually part of this show too, but this time there are only butterfly wings.) I think it has to do with the fact that most of the objects in the show are smaller aggregates put together through either an unexpected arrangement or an intricate assembly.

Claire Morgan's flies, for example, are arranged very geometrically as a cube, with a spider disturbing the top and "causing" a couple of flies breaking away from the grid. Young Dutch artist Levi van Veluw applied (not photoshopped) miniature shrubs, trees, and animals onto the contours of his own head and created a series of self-portraits/landscape photos. The living human body becomes a platform and at the same time the core of a replicated nature.

Claire Morgan. On Top of the World, 2009
Bluebottle flies, spider, nylon, lead, acrylic

Levi van Veluw. Landscape I, 2008

Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta of studio DRIFT gathered dandelions, removed the puffs and then obsessively glued them back seed by seed to LED lights. Tim Hawkinson's Point (2009) is also included in the exhibition. At first glance, it seems like a 3D printed object that resembles an organic looking Voronoi structure. In fact, the fragments were cut from eggshell, utilizing their natural curvature to form the delicate piece. Incredible imagination and craftsmanship!

studio DRIFT. Fragile Future 3, 2009
Phosphorus bronze, dandelion puffs, LEDs

Tim Hawkinson. Point, 2009
Eggshell

Google, Pac-Man, and productivity

Last Friday, May 21st was Pac-Man's 30th birthday. Google turned its homepage into a playable Pac-Man game for two days. We all took breaks to enjoy the fun and then told our friends to do the same. Recently, RescueTime, a company that develops time management software, has gathered statistics and analyzed the impact of this first ever interactive Google doodle. Here's the math:

- Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day).
- $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, If the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 x pay rate).
- For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 Google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time. Imagine what you could build with that army of man power.
- $298,803,988 is the dollar tally if all of the Pac-Man players had an approximate cost of the average Google employee.

I am not sure about the money count, but the estimated 4,819,352 hours is a long time. It's almost 550 years! But does that mean our productivity is gobbled? I'm not convinced. First of all, when you add up to a total number, it always looks more stunning. According to RescueTime's data, the average user only spent 36 seconds more on Google.com last Friday. That's just 1/800 of a typical 8-hr work day! Second, these 36 seconds were not taken away from a 100% productive base. If there's no Pac-Man on Google, people would still spend time reading news or going on facebook anyways. Third, we are not machines. Breaks help to recharge our brains. RescueTime founder Tony Wright himself agrees that "Leisure surfing is critical to productivity." A study actually showed that personal use of internet at work would increase productivity by 9%.

So OK, sit back, relax, and let the fun continue! (In fact, Google did let it continue. Pac-Man is here forever!)

What's up with the taxi light?

It's funny that not long after I put up the last post about farfetched references and literal design, London announced their 2012 Olympic mascot Wenlock, and Paralympic mascot Mandeville. I actually think they are pretty cute looking. But when I started to read the description, I couldn't stop laughing.

From the statement of the designer iris: "Wenlock and Mandeville were created from the last drops of steel left over from the construction of the final support girder for the Olympic Stadium."
Some of the design features include:
- The headlight is the hire light of a hackney carriage – a London icon. (Really? That's the best you can do to relate to London?)
- The eye is a camera lens, allowing them to record their journeys. (Big Brother is watching...)
- The Olympic mascot wears the 5 Olympic rings as friendship bands, while the Paralympic mascot wears a personal best wristwatch which also displays the year of the games. (I thought Britney was cheesy.)
- The three peaks on the Olympic mascot were inspired by the 2012 stadium roof, while the Paralympic’s head shape has been inspired by the agitos – the symbol of the paralympic movement.
- The colour of the Olympic mascot shimmers through golds, silver and bronzes to reflect the colour of the medals. (Yes, because they are as slick as Zaha's renderings!)

Olympic mascots can be traced back to 1932, when "Smoky" the dog was born just before the games in the LA Olympic Village. The first mascot officially designed for the Olympic Games was Waldi, a German breed Dachshund dog, of the Munich 1972 Games. Since then, every Olympic Games would pick a mascot to reflect the identity of the host city and represent Olympic ideals.

Smoky, 1932, Los Angeles

Waldi (Dachshund dog), Munich 1972
Amik (beaver), Montreal 1976
Misha (Russian bear cub), Moscow 1980
Sam (bald eagle), Los Angeles 1984
Hodori (tiger cub), Seoul 1988
Cobi (a Cubist Catalan sheepdog), Barcelona 1992
Izzy (?), Atlanta 1996
Syd (Platypus), Millie (Echidna), Olly (Kookaburra), Sydney 2000
Phevos and Athena (brother and sister resembling ancient Greek dolls) , Athens 2004
Fuwa: Beibei (fish), Jingjing (giant panda), Huanhuan (Olympic flame), Yingying (Tibetan antelope), and Nini (swift), Beijing 2008

It seems a local animal would be an easy choice. In some cases this would also mean a national symbol, like a beaver, a bald eagle, or a panda. I like it better when there's also a hint of local history and culture. For example Cobi, designed by artist Javier Mariscal for the Barcelona Olympics, relates to Catalunya as a local sheepdog. And on top of that, you can see a (not-so-literal) touch of Cubist style that resembles Picasso's artworks.

Literally literal

It had always been exciting to open a new issue of El Croquis. But this time my jaw dropped. In issue 149, the second installment of "collective experiments" of Spanish architects, the Business Center and Hotel in Yerevan, Armenia by S&Aa (Federico Soriano y Dolores Palacios) really got on my nerves. How can someone design a building like that?





I was being nice at the beginning: maybe they had a good reason to use the alphabet like that. As I read through the description, I got more and more agitated. It goes on and on about letters being "the most powerful signs" of humanity, how they "take in our most intimate aspirations and desires," how a "mythical aura" is built up around an undecipherable text, etc. etc. OK, this is really just literally about letters.

One of the problems with architecture right now is that so much has been done already and people are still trying to shock. In order to come up with something that you've never seen, architects start to search outside of architecture, hoping that by expanding the repertoire of architectural language they can sustain their image as the innovative few. All of a sudden, architecture becomes “omnipotent” to absorb anything even extrinsic to it. Everything can be "architecturalized" just as Archimedes was saying, “Name a shape, and I will turn it into architecture.”

I've blogged about this kind of problematic inspirations before. But at least in that case there were some sort of transformations going on and it was not that literal. You can borrow things, be inspired by them. But a stack of letters? How can you even draw a section and study the structure and think that makes sense? "Well... at least it's unique and special..." Oh sorry, you are actually not that original at all. It's been done before. Back in 2003 when BIG and JDS were still PLOT, they did a project in Vejle where they literally made the name of the city into five small towers. (Btw, that looks horrible too.)

PLOT: The Vejle Houses, 2003

Fish and fishing

The first year studio review at Cornell last Wednesday got me to reflect quite a bit on teaching. It's not hard to imagine how crucial this formation year is to a student's future career. The question is, what does education mean in this process? What's a teacher's role?

A Chinese proverb says, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." When we talk about architecture, what education should offer are series of techniques and ways of thinking. It should be more about how to design than the design itself. If a teacher is trying to impose the form of a box, it's like saying "here's a trout - there's no other fish out there."

Even with my limited knowledge, I know there are also salmon, tuna, cod, herring, mackerel, sardine, catfish, and monkfish... Perhaps the first thing a teacher should do is to ask the student, "What do you want to achieve in your project?" The fundamental issue of design is its intent, or purpose. What does it do? Why do you make it like this? First year students may not really know how to clarify their minds. The teacher's job is to guide them through it, help them to discover good ideas from what they see, and keep the ideas clear through the process.

After we have a clear idea, we can talk about techniques. How many different ways are there to catch a fish? Wikipedia says hand gathering, spearing, netting, angling, and trapping. I've also seen noodling. And where to look for the fish? I'll suggest Norway or Canada if you want salmon. Southern US if you want to try noodling. Here, the design intent acts as a pointer to systematic and rigorous explorations. Various reiterations would be done but they shouldn't be random. Experiments are not aimless wanders - they are usually conducted in a structured way.

Suppose the student catches a big fish after several attempts. What's next? Well, time to cook. A good design still needs a good presentation, which includes graphic illustrations and verbal description. A teacher's role here is to help the student find the most effective recipe to communicate what the design is all about, from intent to process to the final materialization.

Imagine all the steps mentioned above went smoothly, we would have a yummy dish on the table. (Bon Appetit!) But don't forget, the bottom line is that the student should be able to have a same, if not better, quality meal again tomorrow.

On having a good eye

Photography before the 1920s and 30s was primarily big cameras on tripods making staged photos. Photographers opened studios, had the subjects sit or stand in a certain manner, and with a click of the flash, voilà! But this kind of "manufactured" photography did not concern Henri Cartier-Bresson. Rather than arranging the image beforehand, he went out to discover and seize it. He prowled the streets all day with his Leica 35mm camera in his hand, capturing and framing moments of life with his unique sensibility. A good example is Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare in 1932. Here, the reflective still water, the ladder, the ripples, and the leaping man were caught right before the man's heel touched the water. Cartier-Bresson managed to freeze action at this particular moment of tension. It makes the anticipation for the ripples around the man rather uncanny.

Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris. 1932

He didn't just stop at visual forms. The capacity of hand-held camera as a recorder of everyday life gave photography the potential of being an instrument of storytelling. In the late 1930s, Cartier-Bresson started to explore deeper meanings behind photographic expressions. He engaged himself in the rapid changing postwar world, developing the narrative dimension of images with his photo-essays. This new "real life reportage" style earned him the recognition as the father of modern photojournalism.

Photo-Essay: The Great Leap Forward, China. 1958

The subjects of Cartier-Bresson's photos are usually average people. Even when he covered the coronation of King George VI in 1937, he focused on the Londoners on the street and took no pictures of the new king. Through the lens of Cartier-Bresson, these people (individuals, small groups, or big crowds) and their intense emotions (joy, agony, love, or hatred) reveal the significance of the events. The reunion of a mother and son who had been separated throughout the war, the mourning crowd trying to get a hold on the train carrying Gandhi's ashes, the first time when some Chinese kids watched TV, and the enthusiastic young man trying out a new car in Paris... are all examples of meaningful snapshots. The images transcend the specificity of these people and act on a metaphorical level as illustrations of history.

New York. 1946

Train Carrying Gandhi's Ashes Leaves Delhi. 1948

The Great Leap Forward, China. 1958
These youngsters are seeing television for the first time.

Automobile Show, Paris. 1968

Cartier-Bresson certainly had an eagle eye to pick up the telling moments. Snapshots require a spontaneous instant when question and decision happen almost at the same time. For Cartier-Bresson, "Photography is simultaneously and within a fraction of a second the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact." This quick reaction to unexpected events doesn't come from nowhere. He involved himself in the situation, observed closely, and tried to understand the intricate relationships between human beings. As Cartier-Bresson said, "It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis." In order to see, you have to feel, to think, and you can't be ignorant.

This handsome Henri Cartier-Bresson retrospective at MoMA reminds me of another photography show I saw at the Met last year: "Robert Frank's The Americans" on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. This acclaimed photo album includes 83 photos that Frank took on several road trips in the US during 1955-56. The two European photographers, Cartier-Bresson and Frank, saw almost eye to eye on the themes about America around the 1950s: vulgarity, greed, class, and racism. Frank also used the method of street photography, similar to Cartier-Bresson's, to explore these themes. In Charleston, we see a middle-aged African American woman holding a baby with skin so pale that it looks almost out of place. In New Orleans, passengers on a trolley were seated in the social order that prevailed in a pre-civil-rights, pre-feminist, pre-youth-culture nation. The way Frank caught this moment is quite interesting. He was there shooting a parade. Then with an accidental swing of the camera, he saw the trolley from the viewfinder. He was in the right place at the right time. More importantly, he had the right knowledge and attitude to couple with intuitions and reflexes. Like Cartier-Bresson, Frank has a good eye that is aligned with his head and his heart. The camera is simultaneously a feeling and a thinking device, a sensor and a processor.

Henri Cartier-Bresson. New York. 1947

Robert Frank. Navy Recruiting Station, Post Office - Butte, Montana. 1956

Henri Cartier-Bresson. New York. 1959

Robert Frank. Charleston, South Carolina. 1955

Henri Cartier-Bresson. Nashville, Tennesee. 1961
An African-American student is denied entry to a theater. He keeps his hands in his pockets to demonstrate that his protest is nonviolent.

Robert Frank. Trolley - New Orleans. 1955

Yehuda said, "Intuition without knowledge is blind." That's so true. In my book, there is no such thing as an "ignorant genius." Being clueless and impulsive at the same time can only lead to ridiculous arbitrariness.