The Sydney Fireworks

Published: 26 Feb 2013

This year I was able to experience the famed Sydney New Year’s Eve Fireworks. The event is considered an international tourist attraction, and for months I relished the anticipation because so many other ordinary pleasures are impossible just now. I wanted to enjoy them, but fireworks also form one of the primary kutachi metaphors, so that was an additional draw. This note talks about what I think is special, how the Sydney experience stacked up and at the end I write a bit about the Kutachi connection.

The 1972 Norfolk Show

How Boom-Boom hosed around my eidetic machinery.

The initial experience — the one that made fireworks essential in a full vision of my future life — was in 1972, I believe, at a waterfront municipal Independence Day event. It was an inaugural Fourth of July celebration for that park and the planned adjacent ‘festival marketplace,’ so the budget was rich. The contractor was BoomBoom Zambelli.

We arrived early and found a spot in the viewing peninsula with two launching barges on either side. I was able to lay down under the planned space of explosions so that the full span of my peripheral vision was filled with the show.

The main part of the show — I have since learned — was a usual B level orchestration. That part mattered to me only because it was spatial and I was well placed. I entered it and a few times when the pace was heavy, it seemed to me that there was some deep understanding of how the human cognitive apparatus works. Probably this was part intuition on the part of the designer, and part family craft handed down through the generations. The effect in this part of the show was to spatially and temporally place the visual blossoms just before our ability to comprehend the previous situation. These were shortlived episodes and costly because you have to nest each blossom in sub-blossoms of other explosions. The short term effect was pretty but the more important effect was to establish a precedent and vocabulary of neural manipulation, making it the training session for what followed; what really mattered was the final act, probably 200-250 seconds long.

The show ended with simple percussive salutes. You’d hear a foof when each item was launched from the mortar and a few moments later there would be a bright, compact light, smaller than a moon but as brilliant. A second or so after that the loud report would reach you, hitting your face and chest with a impact mirroring that which you heard in the distance with the launch. So far as this sound, it seemed that the launch explosion had sent a packet of messages in the air and the second explosion singled me out to beam one of them to.

These messages were rather impressive from my observation point, and some of them reminded me that I was within sight of where the Monitor and Virginia fought theirsea battle, the one that settled the existence of the democracy I cherish and worry about.

The remarkable thing about the end of the show was the timing. You have a number of events:

You have the knowledge that something has been launched because you can hear the foof (and sometimes see a small flare from the tube). It doesn’t take long to learn the precise time between launch and the appearance somewhere random of the burst. You anticipate each visual burst because it is signaled and you are in suspense until it occurs.
You have the burst of light itself, brilliant enough to force your attention to it.
You have the situation of the last few bursts as an array of light. Thanks to our eideticmemory, we hold these bursts in our optic nerve for a brief time, so that even though they disappear quickly in the sky, they persist as spatial patterns in our minds.
You have the jolt against your chest and ears that each spark sends. The time between seeing and hearing/feeling is precise as well and is quickly learned when there are only a few bursts.
And you have the situation of the series of percussive beats against your chest.

The sequence of launches is not random, but precisely determined by the designer, Boom Boom. Here is what happened to me. At first, the launches are far between. You consider them not as an assembly but as single structures: launch foof, seen burst, felt report for each one. Your cognitive apparatus is easily trained for this sort of thing; because the steps take the same time, you can sort out quite a number of discrete events.

But as the pace increases, you see not individual bursts but irregular patterns of bursts. The foofs become irrelevant and you move into a mode of perceiving two situations. One is of the lights and the second is of the sounds. These are managed in two different parts of the brain; the lights with the eidetic impression are a spatial perception and were especially so for me in that spot that night. The chest pulses are a perceived rhythmically, received and managed by a different set of cognitive machines. In this trotting phase of the show, the tracking is of dynamic situations. There is enough time between the situations you see and those you feel for you to order the former to inform the latter. The events now are:

See and chunk the visuals into spatial arrays.
“Understand” those arrays.
Feel the sonic beats.
Use the models of spatial situations to inform the understanding of what you viscerally feel.

This works well enough in your mind, and the pace, while much faster, accelerated slowly in this phase so that you could develop some skills in managing what was happening. But then the designer moved abruptly into a faster pace, radically more distributed set of bursts, now from new locations. At the same time, he created more local order in the spatial bursts. This drew you into working harder to comprehend the spatial situations, but now the events crossed over. It now took longer to comprehend the spatial situation than to receive the corresponding sonic situation so it now became impossible to use the same situation logic the designer just teased you into depending on. No evaluation was allowed to finish and even this perception was not allowed to form.

This phase probably was a third of the finale, meaning is was well under a minute. But it was one of the most exhilarating few seconds of my life, pulling in all the training I had been doing for other reasons. It was as if the puppies you were frolicking with became galloping horse-stars and then stampeding whale-ocean-galaxies but just slowly enough that you almost could handle or even master it. Almost, and then the job becomes a matter of understanding the nature of the trouble your mind has put itself in.

The universe overwhelms your place in it. Time folds. Cause runs backwards.

Great. That and the later analysis of the conceptual processes involved helped me a lot in my subsequent work.

Boom Boom was the son of an Italian immigrant, from a family in fireworks for generations. The family business would eventually grow to its current size, employing thousands, but in 1972 the model was that Boom Boom (George Junior) was the artisan and everyone else was support — a matter of a performance genius perhaps connecting with an appreciative viewer.

Those days may be gone in the fireworks business, I cannot know.

The US is a constitutional democracy, a great experiment in living justly. But deep flaws festered within the system, making the Civil War inevitable. We still have many of those flaws, but I believe it was the defeat of the Southern Secession which gave American justice a chance. That war was complex, with many notable large battles; it was ‘won’ the usual way (before modern warfare), by denying supply lines to the enemy. That largely boiled down to control of the sea, specifically a blockade of NorfolkVirginia and that in turn boiled down to a single battle between two warships.

They were both modern in key respects: armor and steam power. Ships in those days were made of wood, and a single well placed shell could finish a ship. It could simply blow a sinkhole, or decimate a crew with shrapnel or set a fire to both kill and sink. The solution was iron plates but the engineering was different on the opposing sides; it is tempting to relate the engineering decisions to overall worldviews.

The Southern solution was to take a conventional warship and cover it with iron, providing all the conventional crew and firepower known to be deadly. The Union solution was radical; today it would called disruptive. The hull was leveled nearly at the waterline so relatively safe. Above the waterline were two cannons in an armored swiveling turret. This pitted two cannons against the enemy’s many, but that one turret could be aimed in any direction regardless of the position of the ship, while the conventional ship had to aim the entire vessel to shoot at all.

The battle was watched by civilian onlookers on the banks, some near where I lay, hearing something like what I heard. Neither ship was sunk that day, but the effect was a defeat for the Confederacy which had to abandon supply by sea. Military historians will trace the land losses to this constraint, and the most brilliant of today’s military engineers will strive to find the disruptive solution rather than build a bigger more costly version of the previously admired systems. They could do worse thanstudy this event.

The Monitor was subsequently sunk but has recently been raised and preserved. It can be seen at the Newport News Mariner’s Museum.

Something you should do.

Norfolk is a port town, with arguably the best natural deep harbor in the world. At the beginning of the Civil War, Norfolk was on par with New York, Boston and Philadelphia as a commercial hub. While New York was becoming an attractor of the arts, Norfolk’s Customs House reported that the value of the goods in and out of Norfolk was greater than of New York with a growing gap between them. And then the war over slavery was invented...

The South had not recovered from this disaster even a hundred years later and Norfolk was still a backwater culturally and economically when I watched this show. While Virginia was the least primitive of the Confederate states, it was the Confederate capital and the location of most of the great battles, so it suffered comparatively the most from the Civil War. Norfolk’s role as an economic center was destroyed.

During World War I, The military appropriated all the then good dockage to create the world’s largest Naval Base. Today, Norfolk’s economy is dependent on the military. The port is back as the leading port in tonnage, but that it due to the export of coal. The only major corporation in the area is one of the two railroads that carry that coal. What might have been!|

In a separate note I write about my dad, who was a naval engineer working on the subsequent developments of naval turrets and what replaced them.

The sense of sight has three major components. You have the eyeball with associated sensors. This has some very short term memory, especially if you overexpose an image.

At the brain end, you have some rather specific and complex structures. These are used — in several stages — to sort out an understanding of what you see. many folks — like myself — also use many of these same areas and their stored patterns to reason about other things. But that is another story. The brain obviously has some mix of short and long term memories.

In between them is the optic nerve. It transmits the signals between the eye and the brain. But it is made of neurons as well, and functions in part the way the brain does. It is a sort of second brain dedicated to sight.

In most infants, this second brain has its own memory, the eidetic memory. We suppose it helps the developing mind to train spatial reasoning; we cannot be sure. In most people, it fades by midteens.

The memory is not what is called ‘photographic memory.’ That is something else and probably a myth. The eidetic memory can last up to 20 minutes, and functions this way: suppose you are shown a complex photograph for just few moments, not long enough for you to note details, but long enough to register as a situated assembly in the optic nerve.

How it Works

Now you are asked to close your eyes and are presented with detailed questions about the photo. You can ‘see’ the image well enough to answer these questions. It is an odd sort of sight; you don't actually see the photo. You just know all about it as if you could see it.

Young adults can regain this if it is lost; I spent a huge amount of energy doing so. The long term justification was to help me continually reinvent my spatial reasoning apparatus. I use it every moment.

The specific need was occasioned by David Brisson, who had painstakingly created four-dimensional hyperstereograms by hand. The idea was simple; you stare crosseyed at two images or use a viewer (like the View-Master) to produce a three-d image. But only some of the elements in the right and left hand sides merge to produce that three-d image. The other components are ignored.

Now you tilt your head or the image and different elements from the right and left merge, producing a different three-d image, but continuously evolved from the previous. As you continue to tilt, these transitions are handled in the eidetic machinery in the same way as what you currently see. It provides a fourth dimension, allowing you to comprehend four dimensional objects (and in some cases, spaces) as if you lived in a four-dimensional world.

We hoped to employ this in a user interface. (We, incidentally, discovered a correlation between hair whorls and the ability to regain this memory.)

The 1976 Philadelphia Show

A major show that set a different marker.

Based on that Norfolk experience, I hoped to develop a hobby chasing great fireworks shows around the world like George Plimpton was reputed to do with the Kennedy kids. 1976 was the 200 year anniversary of the US as a nation. Philadelphia promised the most extravagant fireworks show in the nation, and indeed in US history.

Boom-Boom was the designer.

So I trucked my patient young family to a hotel we couldn’t afford, a few days before so we could scope conditions. Very early on the appointed day we trundled to what I thought was the best spot. Philadelphia is not well suited for fireworks, or indeed any large public event. The authorities had specified a middle-sized park area, Rittenhouse Square, the fireworks to be launched from the surrounding buildings.

I located in the center.

The event was different than what I expected. It did not have a final act of timed explosions, but it did have an overwhelming number of blossoms from all sides forming a canopy over me. Fireworks of this type have simple goals:

to look pretty,
to present some unexpected effects,
to not let too much time elapse and
by overt extravagance make the viewer feel important because some expensive, short-lived entertainment was provided for just them.

Philadelphia did that and no more. It probably was fortunate because had I been sufficiently goosed, I may have either become a fireworks tramp or made some bad decisions to have enough money to afford to travel lavishly. No magic in Philadelphia.

The 2012 Sydney Show

Where I report how the show stacked up to prior experiences.

The Sydney experience was much anticipated; locals and professionals were effusive.

On the appointed day, we made serious arrangements. A million observers were expected, including international tourists who flew in. (There is no other entry to Australia.) From other visits, I was wary of combative drunks; Australia seems to breed these in abundance.

This was the first year that City leaders were charging for prime viewing spots, but we aimed for one of the good free areas. Two hours before midnight, the police forbade access, apparently for crowd control. So we wandered with thousands of others looking for an opening between buildings. Surely the effect of the barricade increased problems within the crowd.

The situation was unusual for me as we were looking down on the display. It is possible to see the show from below like I saw Norfolk and Philadelphia, but only from boats on the harbor. We therefore had to earn our space by adjusting the jostle level appropriately and so got the intended looking down experience.

The design of this show was radically different, consisting of a mix of rockets from barges and what I will call an object display.

The conventional launches were underwhelming. Seeing them from above greatly lessens the effect. Also, there were perhaps five barges distributed throughout the harbor so the lavishness of these was diminished. All the real focus is on the bridge.

The Sydney Harbor Bridge is an accidental icon. The design of the thing is pretty ugly if imposing in a Scottish ironworks manner. It has become much loved only because the standard photo of the genuinely engaging OperaHouse has the bridge in the background. The two together make the Opera House seem even more exuberant. But in that strange way that associations are folded, the bridge has become as loved, despite its practical plainness.

The Bridge

(Image) The Sydney Harbor Bridge and Opera House.

The main show is of fireworks on the bridge itself. There surely were a lot of them, and they were the only thing any of the preshow stories mentioned. A signature effect was a fire waterfall across the entire length of the bridge.

All this was pretty enough to justify the effort and discomfort; I cannot however recommend it to you as a potential life-altering experience like my early fireworks gave me.

But it was life-altering in the way that the prior fireworks have settled in my soul in those 40 years, allowing me to turn inside out. Instead of expecting a thrill beating on my chest, ears and layered sight, I am able at times to perform the opposite: register myself as seriously in the environment as the emitter.

The outer environment was simple enough: a shared audience whose faces were embossed with the same passing glare as mine. In a great harbor that has never heard the sounds of war — I am particularly aware of that. On soil that has never known the evil of slavery; this is rare. A people originating as prisoners who nobly do not torture imagined or real enemies. All that environmental baggage from Norfolk was exploded here. No deep eidetic history colored the night.

My inner environment was structured with more layers; I was standing next to my partner, a woman who would have watched these very fireworks in past years with boyfriends standing next to her, surely trying to embrace her as only I can. A layer inside that called up my often dormant, multidimensional light skeins that I use to map and understand insights. I don’t pull out this machinery often these days, a spaceship on its way to the museum it often seems. When I do, it matters.

All things in this orrery of internal and external lights aligned, and I was able to have the penetrating, soul-tasting experience I have been seeking since the questions were asked by Boom-Boom in Norfolk a time, a time and a half time ago.

The Opera House is a rare building in my spatial lexicon. I like it, despite my discipline of separating objects from environments. In general, my approach to architecture is as an opportunity to shape the space that envelops you. This allows for profound influence over anyone's cognition, especially if you move through the space in a sort of dialog among you, the designer, the flows of nature and the internal spaces of your mind.

I deeply appreciate Gaudi's internal spaces for instance and think his exteriors are cheap sculptures. Gehry amuses me, but that's not architecture. This is the same bias I bring to fireworks.

The Opera House escapes this appreciation constraint because it so exuberantly escapes so many others. Like much good music, it moves while standing still. It sings. This, I think is the only exception I make with buildings. (The interior has been a disaster from day one for a number of uninteresting reasons.)

This bridge is not admirable; there are some bridges I love. But that is another set of values; shaped force and the incidental lapping of water.

Lessons for Kutachi

Where I suppose starlike assemblies can be levereged.

This post was intended as a personal report on why I like the metaphor of dynamic artificial stars and designed complexity placed beyond our ability to sense for representing situations.

I am planning the official Kutachi Project essays these days. There surely will be an entry for stars and constellations to be considered as metaphors, together with color and brightness scintillation. This is almost expected in current large data structure visualizations, and a number of advanced visualization tools use the idea.