How Lovely

I can't help it: it really does strike me that the Chinese might've thought much better than to hire one Albert Speer as a central planner on the Olympic Games. That would be: the son of that Albert Speer.

Bonus curiosity: the Taipei Times article is written by Nina Khrushcheva. That's Nikita Khrushchev's grand-daughter.

I agree with her.

All over the net, I've seen various ravings about the Opening Ceremony. That was the biggest cued lighting production I ever saw. The scale of automated lights control was out of hand.

Consider two colors:

That's a section of a 640x480 screen capture from the NBC broadcast. (It links the full image.) The long graphic element running the width of the image is the floor LED screen. The rectangle that hangs in a 'U' over the floor is the painting, which is flying around at this point in the show. The long blue line with the yellow highlights in the foreground is a line of men in blue costumes, each holding a boat-oar sort of thing which is about twenty feet long. They wave these things around in synchronized motion.

About the lighting colors: the general field here is a Medium Blue. In the camera angle in this first image, that field is most prominent in the lower-left corner of the frame. However, along the line of men there is falling a lighter color that we'll call a Steel Blue. That field is about fifty or sixty feet wide and as long as the line of men.

Look at this next image:


The single line of Oarsmen has now broken into several sections, each of which has rotated at an angle to the original full-line axis. The Medium Blue field is visible where it was before. However, the Steel Blue field is now also broken into sections and rotated along with its target areas.

What's important about this is the scale on which it's taking place. The floor area of the stadium is over two million square feet, and they're playing all of it under show lights. More than twenty-five hundred automated lighting instruments were up to the job of laying color precisely on target, on time, in an outlandish space: they're treating it like it was a sixty-by-forty foot deck down at the local proscenium theater.

The fly-rigging was amazing, and I'd love to see the drawings. What you saw the other night was the biggest extension of rock production technology to date, and make no mistake that that's not what it was. None of it will ever tour, but almost everything about the hardware and a great deal of the design (color saturation, for instance) can be traced directly back to San Francisco acid shows in the 1960's, the principles and aspirations of which rock-tour crews have been dragging around ever since. (A milestone: Genesis funding development of the Vari*Lite, the first touring stage light automated for color and focus, which debuted in 1981.)

From the cold eye of technique, this show was a stupendous integration of applied technology. This is what the craft can do today: show you a real-live illusion of a man running along an unfolding scroll over a hundred and fifty feet in the air along a circumference of over fifteen hundred feet.

What it cannot do is abstract the ethical purpose to which it's put.

It was all very pretty, but I couldn't like the look of it. If I had the fruits of over a billion peoples' labor at my disposal, I should hope that I could paint big pretty pictures, too.