If you’ve ever been to Tokyo, or seen it in movies, you know that areas like Shinjuku and Shibuya are completely awash in light almost 24/7. There are huge neon structures peddling everything from pachinko and pornography to coffee and the iPhone. One might think that this incredible amount of advertising would be maddening, but for several reasons, Japan has managed to gracefully incorporate new technologies into their advertising while overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time.
Many of the signs you see away from the center of the city are strictly rainbow colored neon affairs, with multi-minute long sequences of various elements blinking and following in various rows and columns, often changing the typography and message of the signs in interesting ways. Here’s a music store:
As technology advanced, many stores went for LED matrices, mostly of the plug and play variety. They often had little SD slots to pop in whatever programming you had done up, and would play multi-color, multi-typeface messages with dozens of delightfully cheesy scrolling and flipping effects. Mostly, these are left outside all night, which is amazing because I think here in the US these probably wouldn’t last a few days.
Anyway, what I want to write about is the most inspiring thing I saw in Japan, and perhaps one of the best instances of the new forms of advertising and how effective they are. Outside of Shinjuku station there is an art installation called MYLORD Box, in an alleyway called Mosaic Street. It is a huge array of RGB LED’s combined with some simple infrared sensors to crudely detect touch. It is combined with an amazingly beautiful set of reactive visualizations, updated to reflect the seasons.
What’s amazing about this installation is that it is both truly a work of “new media art”, as well as an amazing advertisement. The name of the nearby department store is ‘MyLord’, and the amount of traffic gained from this thing is incredible. There are 2 or 3 people constantly with their hands all over it, as well as countless onlookers. And there are some small stickers proclaiming the name of the installation, a simple advertisement for the sponsors of the work.
