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A good friend of mine from my times at Hopkins High is currently working at the advertising agency M! - aka, modernitsa. She helps make ads for huge car company brands, like Hummer and Cadillac, and also has a soft side for shoes, doing Rockport and Converse ads. Sure, she and the M! crew very well may be sucking on the corporate nipple, but what the hell else is an advertising agency supposed to do? They do some work for non-profits, I guess.

Despite this, they have a pretty brilliant approach to self advertising: check out the 2.0 approach to leveraging the webs existing resources by visiting their site here:

http://www.modernista.com/7/index.php

This evening, Tim and I rode up to the Digital Media Commons’ Video and Performance Studio to check out two events: Enjoy Your Flight and Note Works. Enjoy your flight was a bizarre recreation of an airport environment, replete with video surveillance equipment, TSA employees, gates and waiting areas, as well as various disgruntled passengers. While in the security line and sitting in the gate areas we were being watched and questioned by various characters, including TSA employees, a man asking us to sign a petition in favor of the Protect America act - another man freaking out about having to wait in line. One interesting component is that attendees were asked to participate in various ways. For example, Tim was handed an envelope with an ear piece in it; funny to see him wearing it. The interesting thing, though is that one couldn’t really tell who was or wasn’t part of the recreation. Aside from the personas people put on, the whole event seemed like a strange psychological experiment. Normal people began acting in strange ways, when I sat down I asked the woman next to me if the seat was taken, and then picked up a magazine on it - pretending to look through it. People started asking where others were going, small talk broke out - people really seemed to believe that they really might be going somewhere. After about 30 minutes, a terrorist did appear, running out of the waiting area with security in pursuit.

Note Works was a pretty rad installation where participants could interact with and arrange icons to play different musical sounds, set intervals, tones, etc. I’m not sure it was as intuitive as the creators may have hoped, but my 10 minutes or so at the controls led me to create an interesting composition on E, C, A, and B. I wonder if they recorded this too?

Both of these projects were a part of the GROCS initiative, a Digital Media Commons program that funds student research that uses digital media in collaborative learning. Check out the flickr stream for more visuals, including ones of Tim being searched by TSA employees - sort of.

Here’s something for those of us who crave a little organization in our web searching: an Open Source Search Results Clustering Engine called Carrot². Basically, Carrot² uses clustering algorithms to display search results into thematic categories, making it quite easy for users to navigate and draw out useful content. It’s still in demo version and doesn’t appear to have an image or video search capability, but maybe subsequent versions will address this? Check it out.