Part 2 of a Series: Data's Reach, Resonance and Reality
The 1964 World’s Fair Pavilion is a futuristic feature of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. It is a view seasonally guaranteed; relative to my bedroom perch. Winter’s stark and stubborn promise; known to every branch poised between the scope of my sky and the Pavilion’s prominence, has a shelf-life timed to spring’s sensibilities.
The 1964 World’s Fair Pavilion is a futuristic feature of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. It is a view seasonally guaranteed; relative to my bedroom perch. Winter’s stark and stubborn promise; known to every branch poised between the scope of my sky and the Pavilion’s prominence, has a shelf-life timed to spring’s sensibilities.
A candid accounting of my bedroom vantage therefore, demands
disclosing the Pavilion’s inevitable cloaking; imposed by the surety of spring’s
standard canopy — a coefficient of broad leafy change.
The architectural duo responsible for the Pavilion’s
provenance and prominence; Philip Johnson and Lev Zetlin has inspired a
cornucopia of schemes, debate and what-if-ideations. A crowd-sourced Kickstarter campaign promises
a 3-D rendering of the Pavilion to permanently secure its preservation as a “national
treasure.” Numerous public / private
proposals have been floated; most recently by Queens Borough President Melinda
Katz and billionaire John Catsimatidis.
For those geo-spatialists struggling to imagine my bedroom
bounty; think Toronto or Seattle.
Similarly, those skylines afford a weighted, analogous presence made
possible by the “observation” function of the Pavilion’s Towers.
In the case of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, the air space of
nearby JFK International Airport funnels trillions of dollars; a distributed
currency of the world’s cargo, people and couture to and from Queens.
Not far from the Pavilion is the USTA where the US Open
delights competitors and fans of professional tennis annually.
Little Maurice, a NYC Department of Parks and Recreation
property is where I first began hitting tennis balls on a concrete court with a
racquet I acquired on my tenth birthday.
The footprint of players like Althea Gibson, Billy Jean
King, Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert reverberated in my understanding of tennis
culture, play, form and finesse. My tennis
aspirations were inspired by their individual and collective excellence.
On the men’s side of the court, Arthur Ashe, John McEnroe
and Bjorn Borg weighted my tennis performance profile.
It was a much different time. Especially, where boundaries were assessed,
pushed and transcended. The seventies
were simpler. Sport, some feel, quite
acutely, was purer.
Today, we cultivate and live with unknown quantities of
distraction; intentionally pushed by technologies embedded throughout our
lives, no matter our truest passions and interests. The indifference of data, coupled with quantifiers like
market-share means there is often an algorithm close at hand, associated with
those essential drivers of our core being; our tastes and preferences, our
innermost predictors of choice.
Apart from what our ‘privacy’ sensibilities may be, we have access
to hyper-real-reality; where corporate brands and carefully timed consumer
opportunities vie for our augmented attention.
Professional tennis, with its personalities and court-inspired
performances, invite lifestyle-rich -product-driven - strategies and brand explorations. IBM has been pursuing this fertile fact for 25
years.
IBM’s robust, data-driven SlamTracker offers a momentum tracking feature that
captures and visually maps player momentum in real-time, point by point. SlamTracker
also tracks Twitter conversations about the players on the court, identifying
how much positive sentiment each player is generating throughout the match.
At the 2014 US Open, Ralph Lauren, one of the most iconic
and legendary luxury brands, introduced biometrics to fans through fashion. By selectively dressing ball boys with a
simple black, fabric-enhanced, form-fitting t-shirt made recognizable by the Polo
logo, the movements, frequency and speed of the ball boys was tracked. The pace of professional tennis relies very
much on ball boys / girls, so the data [biometrics] is of immediate value.
Ralph Lauren’s fabric-enhancement was derived with the
assistance of OMsignal. The Montreal-based
company is a pioneer in the “wearables” market; a taxonomy which has the
technology sector all abuzz.
Last year, Fashion Week overlapped with the US Open; and
while Mercedes Benz took the wheel with branding rights to the former, tennis
superstar Serena Williams sustained double-fisted success at the USTA with her
18th Grand Slam title followed by the Fashion Week debut of her HSN
- Signature Statement clothing line; aided by the media momentum of Editor-in-Chief,
Anna Wintour of VOGUE.
Our attention, our conscious use of built-environments ever-more
frequently finds us tethered to a plethora of mobile promises and pricing. At the ready; we grip our “smart” devices
and volley volumes, returning what is served up by reaching for our reserves of
preferred credit cards to pay for the privilege of follow-through. At what cost?
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