see a puffin eat a fish

For my outside activity this week, I ran the New York City Marathon. I was accepted in the lottery a long time ago when I was still running every other day in Boston. Now that i’m in New York and at ITP, I haven’t had any time to train or keep up my running schedule. I was going to pass on the Marathon but then decided that I didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to be a part of something so quintessentially new York. I figured we weren’t running into the woods. If things didn’t go well for me I could just get on the subway and go home.

I had a fairly low number, 8614, because when I signed up I was actually training. This sunday, I didn’t want to start in a very fast corral because I didn’t want to risk loosing steam too early in the race. It is after all twenty six miles and more importantly I didn’t want to get trampled. Ignoring my low number, I started way back, with a group which was expected to finish the race in 4:15 and figured if it was too slow for me I could move up. My friend Leon, who was running for Fred’s Team, was back there with me.

The race started out fairly slow. We ran over the Verrazano-Narrows bridge into Brooklyn. To thin out the field, runners split between different levels of the bridge and then rejoined the full pack later on in Brooklyn. This caused congestion and made it difficult to keep an even pace. There was always someone in front of you, slowing down, stopping or going a different speed. I left Leon and his group around mile five or six because the pack density was making it hard for me to concentrate.

The rest is a daze. The marathon takes you through all these breathtaking views but I don’t remember any of them. I don’t even remember the race that well. Injury wise, I thought my fibula fracture would act up but my lower legs were fine. It was my hamstrings, they seized at mile thirteen and didn’t let go for half the marathon. Every time I tried to return to a normal gait they would start to spasm, most likely a symptom of not running for months followed by twenty six point two miles through New York. It was miserable. At mile nineteen I asked a race director for the subway, I was done. I was in Queens and couldn’t take the painful shuffle that my running had become, but he convinced me to keep on going .3 more miles to a medical tent. By the time I got there I decided to keep on going.

With the unusually warm weather, I saw people completely loose it. The heat was too much. People passing out, one guy falling and slamming his head on the sidewalk. I think it’s then that I realized that this wasn’t just something you do. Twenty six miles can kill you.

I couldn’t have made it without all the people on the sidelines handing out snacks and water. I drank a lot of fluids, a lot more than I usually do when I run because of the heat and because I felt salt crystals on my forehead. I was sweating salt. At the end of the race, a race volunteer had me eat a couple of packets of salt and that brought me slightly back in balance.

I’m done with my first Marathon and I’d do it again. Yup, I just said it. At mile 20 yesterday I hated myself for not being at a friend’s party, watching from the sidelines, drinking but now I just want to heal up so I can start properly training. Running is addictive and I miss it.

This week in spatial design we had to build the physical manifestation of the data we collected last week for our labyrinth. Since my data from last week was so straightforward and well, data driven, I wanted to build something more abstract for this week. I printed up the visio maps and made paper fortune tellers out of them. Like this one:

Each fortune teller gave the user an opportunity to take a different path in the labyrinth. I then strung a number of fortune tellers together to expand the labyrinth.

Jean-Marc had sent us this email a few days before this friday’s class:

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Please note that Nina Freedman will be our guest critic on Friday. Nina will review your labyrinth projects. She is a NY architect with interest in community driven architecture, sustainable architecture, research and spatial explorations with technology. Nina collaborated on national and international projects with Richard Meier, Renzo Piano and Paul Rudolph, while at the Architectural Association, in London, she studied with Peter Cook, formerly of Archigram. She is currently with H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture (www.h3hc.com ), formerly, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates.

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Nina had some interesting feedback for my work. I did my best to try to keep my process labyrinth from being a linear progression but she said that this gives it the appearance of randomness. It lacks a coherent structure. To improve on that, she suggested some other media to bring everything together. Possibly sound from the pictures to give the piece a connecting spine.

I’m going to large print last week’s work and maybe put it up @ the show. I could only double it inside because Visio would not save very large resolution/size files. I need to learn Illustrator.

In The Shape of Space, Minsky hypothesizes how we, as newborns learn to sense the space around us, with an eye towards crafting artificial intelligence algorithms to do the same. How do we figure it out and put it all together? Where is the prime mover for the development of our relative understanding of our surroundings. How is it that individuals come to the same collective understanding about what is and isn’t?

What I find most interesting is the how we consistently mistake truth for our imagination. When we have seen an object from a single perspective, we imagine what it looks like from other perspectives and ‘recognize’ it from said perspectives. We do this using learned information about perception and space. This power of imagination allows us to function but closes us off to worlds and possibilities that we will no longer allow to happen. Real breakthroughs appear when we recede and let go of those assumptions. When we think like a child, again.

Borge’s The Library of Babel describes a labyrinth containing a finite set of all the books ever written and all the books ever to be written. By generating all combinations of a set of alphabetic characters, the Library’s contents guarantee a super set of all possible information. All predictions into the future, including a visitor’s personal post mortem biography, exist somewhere in the Library.

All the useful information in the world has been generated for the library but the problem is it lacks context. The books, shelved arbitrarily, possibly by the location of the characters on their pages do not give any insight into their truth or validity. They exist as is and it is up to the reader to give them value. This arrangement is maddening to the library’s visitors and employees.

The library is visited both by official censors and truth seekers. Both will fail. The censors can never truly destroy any information they deem dangerous because another, slightly different (maybe with just an extra comma), version of the same book exists somewhere else in the library. The truth seekers find the truth but they never know if it is the truth that they are looking for. There are many answers in the library but it’s up to the visitor to match the answers to the questions.

Borge’s essay is a timeless reflection on the value and weight of information, on the subjective perspective that defines truth. His essay could easily be applied to the current emerging medias, where everyone can publish their own book of potentially meaningless alphanumeric characters. I would also say that the essay is hopeful. There is a certain beauty to a labyrinth of true answers, indestructible and unhindered by self interested.

My outside activity this week was riding the M5 bus all the way up to the Bronx for red’s class. It’s a really smart way to see the city. If/when I move again, i’ll keep that idea with me. I saw all these parts of town that I either have no reason to visit or that I would have assumed had nothing for me. The fake parts they show on television and the poor parts that don’t have enough clout to have frequent street cleaning.

I also biked from party to party with my fairy wings, which had to be the highlight of the week. I live living here. You can do stuff like that and not get assaulted.