Yahoo!
Challenge
To celebrate their 10th anniversary, Yahoo! wanted to create a digital time capsule by projecting images submitted by the Yahoo! community onto a spectacular outdoor landscape and streaming it online in a webcast. Yahoo! commissioned HMG to design and produce the remote event.
Solution
After reviewing multiple locations in Mexico, Yahoo! selected Native American sacred lands in New Mexico to mount the multimedia installation. HMG projected thousands of user-submitted images from around the world onto the red rocks of the Jemez Pueblo in the desert. The event was broadcast to the Yahoo! home page and to the global media. As a symbolic act, we beamed the broadcast into deep space as a continuous ray of light that travels into the future.
Impact
Yahoo! celebrated the company and its global community with a digital, electronic anthropological event unlike any other. Over 170,000 people throughout the world participated by submitting images. Yahoo received global media press for days and the event showcased the company as a visionary technology leader.
The Details.
With an understanding of the sensitivities of working on sacred lands, HMG negotiated with tribal leaders to ensure that that the event would proceed with the upmost respect for the Native American culture and land. To execute the three day, 18-hour live broadcast, we mobilized an armada of resources and equipment to the remote location and created a temporary, self-contained city in the desert, co-existing with the local tribe. Because of the anthropological uniqueness of the event, HMG negotiated to house the archives in the Smithsonian Institution’s Folkways Recordings for future study.