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Monday, September 3, 2007

Labor Day 2007 Fireworks in Cincinnati

Here are the pictures I shot during the 31st Anniversary of WEBN fireworks that was held yesterday in Cincinnati on the banks of Ohio River. I've been attending this event for past 3 years. Each year to get different perspective, I've been going to the different location from where you can view this spectacular half an hour display organized by WEBN, the Rock Station of Cincinnati. This year I went to Eden Park, located on the top of the hill from where you can get a real nice view of Newport, KY, and Downtown Cincinnati separated by Ohio River. I admit that it can't beat the sensation one gets from watching the fireworks from the river bank itself (which I did last year), but there's no way I could've captured the entire firework as it happened if I was so close to the scene. And the best part is that I didn't have to waste any time on traffic after the show was over. Last year it took about 2 hours just to get home directly from the place of event (via driving route of 15 minutes in normal condition). Besides, I also avoided getting temporarily deaf due to the loud sound produced by the explosion.

So taking consideration of all these things I'd say yesterday's location is definitely worth visiting again.

External Links:

The Kentucky Post: Word of mouth (and fireworks) launched Riverfest
The Enquirer: Cincinnati fireworks going global
WEBN Rock Station
Cincinnati Bell

Sunday, August 19, 2007

We Feel Fine: An Improvising Digital Art Masterpiece

Talking about our feelings have you ever imagined what would it be like to represent the aggregate feelings of all the human beings on this planet? Neither did I. But a digital programmer/artist Jonathan Harris did that and has accomplished to a certain degree (at least covering those who wrote their feelings online in their personal blogs) by creating a web-based program called “We Feel Fine.”

He considers himself as storyteller. He believes that the people all around the world are similar in many different ways but we all have trouble seeing that because we have gaps. The gap could be due to our language, ethnicity, wealth, religion, age, gender, sexuality, education etc. And we all try to define ourselves by those, despite of things which we have in common.

One of the things that is common to all of us is the very deep need to express ourselves. There’s nothing new about the self expression. We try to rectifying by various means such as creating art, writing poems, singing songs, scripting editorials and sending them into the newspaper, gossiping with friends. What's new about the way it is happening now is that it is happening through our expression on the Internet. People have been leaving behind foot-prints that give their moment of self expression.

He tries to bring those foot prints together via his program that collects the data representing feeling from many different sources across the Internet. Later the program interprets it graphically in the form of beautiful animation or the still photograph that tells the story. One of the cool features of the program is that it lets you view the result based on the feelings of the people falling only in certain demography -Such as the feelings of girls who are in their twenties. The summary of these types of data could be a very useful for different research purposes. Who knows, it might even solve the mystery of leading cause of suicides and will help to device the prevention instead of having many different specialists on this subject aiming in dark without such relevant information collected from the mass.

Here are some of the inspiring photographs that was generated by the program by linking thoughts with the pictures that are found in the same page.

www.flickr.com

You can view his presentation on 'We Feel Fine' at TED.com by clicking on the following link
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/144

To view Jonathan's complete works visit his website http://www.number27.org/.

Note: You need to have JAVA Runtime files installed on your computer in order to run the program 'We Feel Fine'. You can follow this link and click 'Download' button next to 'Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 Update 2' to get the latest version.