In addition to this blog, EMERGE also provides leading edge cultural insights, analysis and perspective to clients, brands and creative teams from BSSP. While much of this work takes the shape of focused research and reporting, we're also into creating experiential events which take creatives out of the office to meet innovators and to check out new and exciting institutions, happenings and exhibitions. A couple of weeks ago, EMERGE took a crew of media planners, strategists, account executives and designers from BSSP over the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco for what we dubbed The Magical Mystery Tour. The afternoon was pretty exciting, yielding lots of inspiring ideas, great conversations, and most significantly, some new ways of looking at the work of brand strategy, advertising, and culture at large. We're cutting together a short documentary of the tour which we'll be uploading as soon as its done but in the meantime here is a brief summary of what we saw and who we met.

If you are intereted in having EMERGE organize a cultural tour please contact Ed Cotton at ecotton@bssp.com

Magical Mystery Tour June, 2007

First Stop: Yerba Buena Center For the Arts
A pioneering multidisciplinary arts facility, the YBCA is a unique place where visual arts, performance and film share an incredible set of institutional resources and the youngest audience of any major arts center in the United States. Through adventurous programming and forward-thinking partnerships with corporate underwriters, YBCA has cemented its place at the forefront of San Francisco's creative community. Through their curatorial methodology organized around Big Ideas. Director of Community Engagement Joel Tan explained how the YBCA unifies its eclectic program under the rubric of three broad thematic notions that are relevant to the work of artists working in disparate disciplines, media, and geographic contexts. Aside from checking out some incredible exhibitons including works by R. Crumb, William Pope L., and a show of various Bay Area collectives called Collective Foundation, we got a crash course in the curatorial process that has come to define Yerba Buena, meet some of their incredible and inspiring staff, and take a tour of the exhibitions in their company.

Second Stop:Revision3 and XLR8R
After leaving the YBCA, the Tour headed over to the offices of XLR8R to have a sit down with publisher Andrew Smith and David Prager from Revision3, a new broadband entertainment network founded by Prager and several key players over at Digg!. Prager introduced us to Revision3's programming and took us through their vision for the company's growth via multiple distribution platforms including iTunes, Odeo and BitTorrent while Smith and his staff explained how their XLR8R TV program adds to Rev3's content and helps expand the XLR8R brand beyond their print edition and web presence. The following day, Greylock announced a second round of funding for Revision3 to the tune of $8 million dollars. Exciting stuff!

Third Stop: Recombinant Media Labs
The last stop on the Magical Mystery Tour took our core group plus a few curious latecomers from BSSP to a desolate block in SoMa where an anonymous looking door opened up into one of the most unusual and inspiring arts spaces on Earth. The Recombinant Media Lab is the brainchild of experimental musician Naut Humon, who is best known for his work with Rhythm and Noise as well as his groundbreaking independent record label Asphodel. The RML, however, is a different beast altogether. Housing Humon's mindboggling synthesizer collection as well as a full service recording studio stuffed to the gills with vintage and cutting-edge gear, the space also boasts a gallery room as well as a black box theater and control room for a unique custom built ten-channel audio-visual surround environment. Constructed so there are massive screens surrounding the audience with speakers placed throughout the room and embedded in the floor, the RML is a development and performance space for an esoteric brand of experimental video and sound art unlike anything outside of festivals like Austria's Ars Electronica. Our visit included a 90 minute demonstration of the facility, which ranged from warm digi-dub music to showcase the powerful acoustics of the room to dizzying assaults of digital noise and video swirling in 360 degrees. Also present for the tour were a small army of recently recruited summer interns, financial backers, and the folks from the likeminded Obscura Digital who ironically had an ambitious project with Brian Eno's 77 Million Paintings screening a few days later at the YBCA. While the RML had the least apparent application to the work we do at BSSP, it proved to be the most interesting and ultimately inspiring, by demonstrating just how far technology is allowing visionary creatives to push and the difficulties of financing such boundless experimentalism without the governmental underwriting which sustains likeminded institutions in Europe.

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