h.o + Dentsu
h.o is: Taizo Zushi, Hide Ogawa, Mizuya Sato, Yuichi Tamagawa and Emiko Ogawa
Dentsu is: Naoto Oiwa, Makoto Teramoto, Yasuharu Sasaki and Tsubasa Kayasuga

With the advancement of information technology, the environment in which we live, our actions and the ways of the market are all rapidly changing. It would seem that information search technology, such as Google’s, has provided efficient means of bringing together people and information. Instead of passively receiving and sifting through a flood of information from sources such as television and advertisements, we are able to obtain only the information we seek through proactive search.

However, this seemingly efficient way of acquiring information has deprived us of opportunities to come across “unexpected encounters” with information and products. Confined in the information space of our interest, we are less likely to meet and discover new items and information previously provided by mass targeted advertising.

Therefore, in this project, targeting the 2009 Ars Electronica Festival catalog, we will create a prototype of a new advertisement system that will provoke interest in artists and works one has previously been unaware of, motivating them to pick up a catalog.

The Ars Electronica Festival catalog contains page-by-page information on participating artists, works on display, projects, conference information and scheduled performances during the festival. What would happen if we tie together this physical catalog with activity from a virtual space like the Internet?

We designed a system where “Buzz” is extracted and generated based on people’s interests and activities on the Ars Electronica web site. We then map the extracted Buzz to information on the pages of the Festival catalog and convert it into physical output. At our installation site, every time there is access to the web site, Buzz is translated into output to a physical bookshop.

P.xx seems to be popular in the Asian region. (access region data)
P.xx has suddenly gained attention this week. (change in access count)
People who like P.xx seem to also access P.yy. (page movement history)

Also, based on the same system, we will print real-time designed bookmarks and paper bags to promote the sales of the festival catalog.

Through this installation, we express the social image of Ars Electronica in real time by tying together talk collected from the web with actual pages of the catalog. Visitors to the festival will be able to bring home “advertisements” generated from voices on the web. In this new bookstore, the catalog is not just a product but also a new advertisement medium. We create active physical encounters that advertisements used to provide, against today’s mechanically streamlined and closed advertisement system provided by information acquisition technologies.

Google says they will digitize all books and make them searchable. In the process, books will be dismantled and the physical element of “pages” will lose its meaning. On the other hand, the way we discover information is likely to expand beyond online search into interactions with the physical world. When we look at things from both this “cloud” and “ground” viewpoint, how can we provide discovery of new products and information in a simple and straightforward manner? Ads are definitely an effective means to accomplish this. There should be an attractive method of communication that brings together people and products—unlike yesterday’s ads which some consider a nuisance. In the process of pursuing this new form of advertisement, we believe we will be able to gain insight on human nature.

This project is a product of a joint project between the artist group “h.o” and the top Japanese advertising agency “Dentsu”, which started in 2008. Continuing from last year’s “A New Cultural Advertising Project (T-shirt project)”, it is an experiment on new forms of advertising staged at the Ars Electronica festival.

h.o is: Taizo Zushi, Hide Ogawa, Mizuya Sato, Yuichi Tamagawa and Emiko Ogawa
Dentsu is: Naoto Oiwa, Makoto Teramoto, Yasuharu Sasaki and Tsubasa Kayasuga