Hit MoMA for Your Fix of 20 Years in Advertising

Ooh! This looks like it'll be fun. On Monday, the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP) premiered The Art & Technique of the American Commercial show at MoMA New York.

The show explores the last 20 years of American advertising, a nostalgia-heavy treat fit to dilate the pupils of any ad geek, but it'll also be very "present"-oriented -- that is, you'll be seeing how the work has evolved to produce the aesthetics used in great advertising (think Apple) today.

Here's the program teaser. Careful ... it's a little bit hyper-visual, but it lends a sense of what to expect in terms of ambiance.

Production firm Brand New School is also helping with certain design elements, including a 40-foot interactive installation in the middle of MoMA's Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden.

The "proprietary machine-vision" installation delivers excerpts from hundreds of AICP archive spots to people who draw near.

"The wall presents an animated attract loop that spans the full canvas of 40 displays," explains BNS interactive director Justin Bakse, who built it along with lead developer Greg Schomburg and others. "As guests walk up to the installation, individual monitors near them display reels showing iconic AICP Show moments from each year."

Sounds very cool and worth playing with, especially if you cream yourself over how advertising and technology interfacing has evolved. And act fast if you want to catch the show itself -- as every year, the program will leave MoMA and travel onward to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, Miami, and Richmond over the next few weeks.