Cai Guo-Qiang's Amazing "Black Ceremony Explosion Event" in Doha

December 5th's "Biggest daytime fireworks show ever" looks pretty awesome (and I rarely use that word).  Al Jazeera has coverage:

There are better videos on the Arab Museum of Modern Art's Facebook page, which sadly are not embeddable.  Watch here and you can see a few of the Grucci techs in action.  Some behind the scenes details viewable here.

The show was designed by NYC-based Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, who also designed the fireworks for the Beijing olympics, to kick off his exhibit at the museum.  

The syncrhonization of the shells, provided by Grucci, is stunningly precise, and this was acheived by embedding control within each fireworks shell.  Some time ago, Guo-Qiang detailed the idea on the "Cool" blog:

Until I started developing the technique of built-in microchips around 2001, all the fireworks were exploded by fuse and the timing of explosions were calculated by the length of fuse. Since fuse was made by hand, it was very difficult to fix the shape and order of explosions of fireworks. But if you use fireworks with built-in microchips, the altitudes and timing of explosions are already calculated.For instance, it is like 2000 people who have tickets get seated exactly in their right seats. I can control the altitude and timing of the explosions of 2000 fireworks. However, there are a good thing and a bad thing about introducing microchips. The good thing is that now I can use the sky as canvas. The bad thing is that they are expensive.

I'll continue researching, but please post a comment if you know more!