Super Andretti Bros.

With the Formula 1 season winding down, we're getting more info about the season for Formula E electric cars, which is run over the fall-spring. Probably the biggest change is that there are new cars with batteries that now have the capacity to run an entire race, so there'll be no more of the silly-sounding mid-race car change.

But another big change is the "Attack Mode" concept. What? you think that's a childish sounding name? Well it was almost called "Hyperboost." And nearly everyone is calling it what it reminds them of: Mario Kart. The premise here is that if you drive over a certain areas of the track, you get a temporary speed boost. The activation area will be off the racing line, so there'll be a bit of strategy on whether it makes sense to go for it.

Many people won't like this on the grounds that:

• it's an artificial gimmick, and,
• if you were going to import something from Mario Kart into real racing, surely it would be the exploding turtle shells.

But the fact is that artificial speed bonuses have been creeping into racing for a while now. Formula 1 has the Drag Reduction System (DRS) in which a driver can press a button to flatten the rear wing to get a temporary aerodynamic aid, though you can only use it for passing. And Indy Cars have the Push To Pass system, where the driver can get a temporary power boost, but only for a total of two minutes per race.

Add a long-time racing fan, I know I'm supposed to hate these ideas as a tarnishing of the pure and simple concept of auto racing. But actually, I'm okay with it. The fact is that racing is reaching the limits of what can be done within the constraints of human abilities and the current technology. It could certainly be managed better than the elitist mess that is Formula 1, but even Indy Car and NASCAR are running into a dull sameness.

When you listen to fans about how to improve racing, their prescription is usually to relax the rules and allow more innovation, but the fact is that rules are limiting money more than innovation, so that unconstrained approach would just lead to even more predictable results. The only way out that I see is to introduce strategic challenges outside of the engineering challenge of making faster and faster cars. Preferably, these would be:

• Strategic challenges that the drivers have to face on the fly, not something that the teams can calculate and optimize to the nth degree.
• Things that the viewers can see and relate to, rather than esoteric considerations that few relate to.

Getting these ideas implemented will be difficult, because Formula 1 has spent a generation promoting the idea that it's a pure challenge of engineering, and that's why it's okay that their races were just expensive parades of predictable order. Pivoting to a future where the cars are near-identical  and interest is generated by in-race bonuses as they do it in Formula E will take a while.

Paintdrop On The Wall

I recently came across a strange news release in my Facebook feed. (Warning: Gen-X age marker ahead!) Massive Attack, the British Trip-Hop group, is celebrating the twentieth anniversary of their classic album Mezzanine. No surprise: they’re issuing a re-release of the album. Big surprise: it’s on paint.

No, this isn’t an effect of my first post-pot-legalization post. They had the album encoded into DNA, then mixed that DNA into a spray paint. So it’s not just paint, it’s genetically-engineered paint. I don’t know of any technology to read the information in DNA, at least, DNA on a wall. So it could be ordinary black paint for all we know. Or perhaps it really contains “Never Gonna Give You Up” in a truly epic Rickroll.

Of course, I have plenty of reactions to this. First is a scientific amazement at the storage capacity of DNA. Then there’s the amazement at their initiative in doing something so unusual. But then that leads to the question of whether this is the best use of music-paint possibilities. It’s black paint, and Massive Attack’s music does have a darkness to it, but I’d really rather tell people that my black paint has Goth in it. Others would, I assume, prefer “Back in Black,” “Back to Black,” or either Black Album. But really, among music paints, I’m sure Purple Rain Purple would be the biggest seller. You could also have White Album White, and other colours would be mixtures of:

• Simply Red
• Orange Crush
• Coldplay Yellow
• Reverend Al Green
• Joni Mitchell Blue
• Indigo Girls
• Violet Femmes

Just remember to use Primus Primer.

But putting all this aside, there’s the subtext that Massive Attack member Robert “3D” Del Naja is rumoured to be infamous graffiti artist Banksy. So a big graffiti-related announcement from the group was greeted with snickers and knowing winks. To be fair, Del Naja is an admitted graffiti artist that Banksy has acknowledged as an influence, so Massive Attack spray paint is not necessarily an indication of nefarious culture jamming.

Of course, you could argue that once you’re using expensive gratuitous technology like this, we’ve left true rebellion and anarchism behind. And that’s something people have been asking about Banksy lately. His previous caper was the auto-shredding painting. That seemed like a great statement against the monetization of Banksy’s works that so often misses his point. But afterwards there were some questions about just how unexpected it was. For one thing, Sotheby’s usually puts paintings on an easel to auction them, which would have prevented the shredder from working, yet this one was conveniently on a wall at the side of the room.

I guess you could say that it’s subversive to talk a major auction house into risking its reputation by participating in performance art. Similarly, you could argue that conning people into buying expensive graffiti implements is a great satire of the economics of music memorabilia. Particularly if it turns out to be ordinary black paint. But even if it is real, memorializing electronic music with genetically-engineered vandalism is some quality cyberpunk.