超級時髦的里約奧運會開幕式

Last week, as Olympic fever gripped Brazil, I travelled to Rio de Janeiro to watch the opening ceremony. I found it an unexpectedly powerful and moving experience, not just because of the exuberant Brazilian music, joyous dancing and visual beauty but also because the event carried earnest political messages about national resilience, climate change and the need to protect refugees.

8月5日，當奧運會熱潮席捲巴西時，我來到里約熱內盧觀看了開幕式。我發現這是一次意外震撼且打動人心的體驗，不僅僅是因爲熱情的巴西音樂、歡樂的舞蹈和視覺美感，還因爲這場盛會傳遞出了有關國家韌性、氣候變化和保護難民的嚴肅政治信息。

There was another factor, however, that made the ceremony so memorable: it delivered spectacular digital visual effects, producing an immersive experience akin to sitting inside the Matrix or Insurgent movies. Over the course of several hours, a breathless kaleidoscope of computer images was beamed on to the walls and floor of the stadium, creating worlds of urban skyscrapers, seascapes and jungle scenes.

然而，還有一個因素讓里約奧運會開幕式變得如此令人難忘：它呈現出了引人入勝的數字視覺效果，給人以類似置身於電影《黑客帝國》(Matrix)或《絕地反擊》(Insurgent)中的浸入式體驗。在短短几個小時的過程中，令人驚歎的電腦畫面千變萬化地投射在體育館的牆壁和地面上，締造出城市摩天大廈、海景以及森林景色的不同世界。

The net result was an experience as visually thrilling and emotionally powerful as anything I saw in the London 2012 opening ceremony (which I was lucky enough to attend) or Beijing’s, in 2008 (which I watched on television) — so much so that when the athletes finally stepped into the area, it was almost an anticlimax.

在視覺震撼以及情感力量方面，里約奧運會開幕式不亞於我在2012年倫敦奧運會開幕式（我有幸參加）或2008年北京奧運會開幕式（我在電視上觀看）上的所見。這種感覺太強烈，以至於運動員最終入場時幾乎令人掃興。

In many ways, this is no surprise: most large events use computer projections these days. London 2012, for example, employed dazzling lighting. But the fact that digitisation now dominates the Olympic opening ceremony is a symbol of how our 21st-century world is changing.

從很多方面來講，這並不令人意外：如今多數大型活動都使用電腦投影技術。例如2012年倫敦奧運會使用了令人眼花繚亂的燈光。但數字化現在主宰了此次奧運會開幕式，這表明我們所處的21世紀的世界正在發生巨大變化。

When I was a student, I was heavily involved in set design: I spent almost every spare minute inside theatre workshops, sawing wood, painting pieces of cloth and assembling scaffolding. It was a messy, physical job and my ambitions were constantly frustrated by gravity or the cost of moving scaffolding. At the Brazil event, the designers were liberated from gravity — the hard “work” was done with light beams and a computer mouse, not scaffolding. It was as if the set designers had been given cyber wings: they could switch scenes with a flexibility I could never have dreamt of — and at a far lower cost.

當我還是個學生時，我從事過很多與舞臺設計有關的活動：我幾乎一有空餘時間就會跑到劇院工作室，在那裏鋸木頭、給布料刷顏料，還組裝腳手架。這是一份又髒又累的體力工作，重力或移動腳手架的成本總是讓我的遠大夢想受挫。在里約奧運會開幕式上，設計師們沒有了重力的困擾，這份“累活”由光束和電腦鼠標完成，不需要腳手架了。舞臺設計師似乎被插上了數字的翅膀：他們能夠以我過去想都不敢想的靈活性轉換場景，而且成本要低得多。

This partly reflected an artistic choice: Fernando Meirelles, the lead designer, is a renowned film-maker. It was also driven by expediency: the crisis-plagued government of Brazil was under pressure to keep costs down (and the budget for the Rio ceremony was reportedly less than half the ￡27m spent in London, and a small fraction of that spent in Beijing). But the key point is this: digitisation is giving designers more bang for their artistic buck; even — or especially — in cash-strapped emerging market nations such as Brazil.

這在一定程度上反映出了一種藝術選擇：此次奧運會開幕式的主設計師費爾南多•梅里爾斯(Fernando Meirelles)是一位知名電影導演。它也是權宜之計的結果：受到危機困擾的巴西政府面臨降低成本的壓力（據報道，里約奧運會開幕式的預算不到倫敦奧運會所花費2700萬英鎊的一半，只是北京奧運會花費的零頭）。但關鍵是：數字化讓設計師獲得更高的藝術性價比；即使（或者特別是）在巴西等資金緊張的新興市場國家也是如此。

This is very cheering, particularly since it echoes a bigger pattern that cuts across the modern world. A few decades ago, anybody who wanted to attend an Olympic event had to either apply for tickets by mail or go to the venue itself — and they had to use paper maps to find their way there; it was a costly and time-consuming process.

這令人深受鼓舞，尤其是因爲這與現代世界盛行的更廣泛趨勢一致。幾十年前，想觀看奧運會的人都必須要麼通過郵件申請門票，要麼親自到賽場購票，他們還必須使用紙質地圖找到通向賽場的路；這是一個昂貴且耗時的過程。

But last week in Rio, one thread that united the spectators — aside from an interest in sports — was that, irrespective of where they hailed from in the world, they all seemed to be clutching smartphones or tablets. These were used to navigate the city, book tickets, hail taxis, connect with friends, track the medal tally — or to post on social media.

但上週在里約，所有觀衆的一個共同點（除了對體育的興趣）是，不論他們來自哪裏，他們似乎都攜帶着智能手機或平板電腦。它們的用途是在里約導航、預訂門票、叫出租車、與朋友聯絡、追蹤獎牌榜或者在社交媒體上發佈消息。

Local Brazilians were similarly engaged: whenever I hailed cabs, the taxi drivers not only used the maps on their phones to find venues and dodge the worst traffic, they used Google Translate to communicate with me, across the Portuguese-English language divide, with remarkable levels of “efficiency” — and low costs.

巴西當地人也有着類似的數字體驗：每當我叫出租車時，出租車司機都會使用手機上的地圖找到賽場並躲避擁堵路線，同時還使用谷歌翻譯(Google Translate)與我交流，以驚人的“效率”和極低的成本跨過葡萄牙語和英語的鴻溝。

This digital power did not always circumvent all the real-world, human obstacles: there were still traffic jams, long security queues to enter events, confusing on-the-ground logistics, and so on. Nor could those computers remove the whiff of sewage that was a constant reminder that a few hundred metres away from some smart Olympic arenas, there were favelas where many people are so poor that they are excluded not only from this digital largesse but also from a properly maintained sewer system.

這種數字力量並不能總是規避所有真實世界的人爲障礙：那裏仍然存在交通擁堵、進入賽場前長長的安檢隊伍、令人困惑的地面物流等等。而且電腦也不能清除下水道的味道，這些味道不斷提醒人們，在一些時髦的奧運場館幾百米開外，很多窮人還居住在貧民窟，他們不僅沒有享受到這種數字技術帶來的大量便利，而且還沒有正常維護的下水系統。

But for those lucky enough to have digital power at their fingertips, the 2016 Olympic experience is a constant blend of the real world and cyber space, which echoes the opening ceremony in every sense. Digitisation is truly giving us wings. And the only thing that is more remarkable than this shift is that most of us now take this magic so completely for granted that we barely ponder it at all — not unless we think about how the world used to be experienced four, eight, 16 or 32 years ago, before humans started to love digital technology almost as much as their real-world sports.

但對於那些有幸動動手指就能掌握數字力量的人而言，2016年裏約奧運會是一種真實世界與數字空間不斷交織的體驗，這種交織在方方面面與開幕式相呼應。數字化確實賦予了我們翅膀。唯一比這種變化更引人注目的是我們多數人現在把這種魔力完全視爲理所當然，我們幾乎根本不會深思，除非我們回憶一下4年、8年、16年或32年前，在人類開始像喜愛真實世界的體育那樣喜愛數字技術之前，我們曾經怎樣體驗這個世界。