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We live in an age in which celebration and the collective sharing of sentiments are becoming less frequent and farther removed from our personal lives. Before, celebrations and the sensations and experiences that went with them may have arisen from births, a neighbor finishing a barn, the harvest of the last crop, or a rite of passage of a family member. Today, they are more distant and therefore more generalized — to the detriment of intimacy.
The result is that people compensate for the reduced frequency and intimacy of celebration by seeking more sensation and emotion from live, extraordinary events and milestones. These larger, organized celebrations must now provide some of the experiences and sensations people once shared privately. People want to participate in some rare and remarkable event — whether it's marking the opening of a World Cup or the arrival of a new century.
Meanwhile, new technologies and forms of communication have allowed people to take part in a much wider range of virtual experiences and sensations than ever before. Far from killing the need for shared experience, virtual technologies enhance the desire of people to be part of some larger, real expression of human emotion and celebration. The individual exposed to more virtual reality winds up longing for confirmation of the actual through collective events.
The New Year's celebration at the Eiffel Tower was an example of that: an event staged in Paris that had a universal appeal and motivation. It was more than just a fireworks display; it was a performance that relied on pyrotechnics to convey elements of sound, light, space and time in a manner that would touch people around the world. Fireworks provide lousy entertainment if you're not right under them — especially if they're being broadcast on television. Our idea was to take the Eiffel Tower — a symbol of audacious architecture and design that propelled the 19th century into the 20th — and place it at the very center of the spectacle.
I worked in partnership with Christophe Berthonneau — the pyrotechnic master in the project — to create a sequence of explosions whose flashes would suggest movement capable of making the Eiffel Tower dance. The key was to master the timing of detonations and lend the light a musical effect.
The other raw material was time itself. Time was at once the central theme and our biggest restriction. Time was what linked us and our project to those witnessing the event live, to those seeing it on television and to those operating the equipment providing the images — but it was a link that offered not even a split-second margin of error.
Because no human intervention could ever guarantee such precision, the event was executed by computer. Ten minutes before it was programmed to begin, we let an atomic clock take over and instruct the computer when it was time to go. That link was made via satellite separately by the computers running the explosions on the tower, and those operating ground-based launchers.
I think one reason people continue to be fascinated with fireworks is that they remain incomprehensible, even though people know how they work. They are a chain of chemical reactions that begins with a spark on the ground and ends in flashes of light several hundred meters in the air. But there is something sufficiently nature-defying so that it remains magical. Indeed, just as any spectator knows that even the most spectacular magic trick relies on some ruse or sleight of hand, we continue to be fascinated by what seems to be the magical manipulation and interaction of fire, air and explosives that bring inert gunpowder to fiery life.
Water works a similar kind of enchantment. It is behind the allure of fountains — which really just squirt water into the air so that it can fall back to ground level. The fascination lies in these formless elements becoming distinctive and interesting. They represent humanity, transforming from a simple mass into something unique and remarkable. Water and fire transcend cultural and linguistic lines, and speak to what is common yet vital to all humans.
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