THE FUTURE OF ADVERTISING?

Saturday marked the New York launch of The Creators Project, a partnership between Vice magazine and Intel that calls itself "a new network dedicated to the celebration of creativity and culture across media, and around the world."

I'd been to the recent press conference, I'd read the website, I'd tried to figure out how exactly The Creators Project was a "a completely new kind of arts and culture channel for a completely new kind of world." I had not yet reached a conclusion (though it seems to be about promoting digital media). I hoped that the 12-hour launch party, from 2pm to 2am at Milk Studios, an 80,000 square-foot space in Manhattan's Meatpacking District, would provide some answers. So I complied with the detailed instructional e-mails, picked up my wristband (at a booth staffed with interns of odds-beating attractiveness and overseen by Vice's associate publisher, John Martin) and submitted myself to the requisite security check before heading into the party/event/expo/whatever it was.

The room was full of flashing lights, fashionable minglers and noise. There was a DJ, a video piece by Takashi Murata, and a schedule of musical performances that included Interpol, The Rapture, Gang Gang Dance and M.I.A. A slick and digital feel pervaded the vast space, as well as a now rare sense of a no-expense-spared agenda. Stacks of a full-colour, 150-page book were on hand to offer perfunctory descriptions of the different creative projects being produced. There were free drinks (Campari, a citrus Collins, Bustelo iced coffee) and a lot of happy spectators wandering around with plastic cups. At the end of one hallway a crowd had gathered around a person waving a plastic cube in front of a monitor upon which corresponding wiggles appeared. A plaque explained the nifty project: "[Z]ink uses an AR tracking system to trace movement in X, Y, and Z space and displays it back to the user in stereoscopic 3D." So went a typical project description.

Nearby was an Olafur Eliasson-like immersion experience called "Triptych" (pictured) by UVA, a British collective. The piece featured three LED panels which responded visually and sonically to the presence of humans in the room (think loud, buzzing noises and saturated shifts in the colour of the room's light). Like Eliasson's "360 Degree Room for all Colors", the morphing pinks, blues and oranges played dizzying tricks on a viewer's mood. The next room featured Muti Randolph's "Deep Screen", a cubic video display made of 6,144 animated light spheres. In a word: hypnotic.

So far, so good. Though it still wasn't clear to me how any of the projects related to Vice or Intel, other than the fact that they were somewhat cool-looking (Vice) and somewhat technology-oriented (Intel). There were no answers to be found in the penthouse, which I infiltrated only to find top dogs of both companies smoking cigarettes in a light rain, as well as the young pop starlet Sky Ferreira floating around with an amused look and lavender streaks in her hair. One floor below was the artist's lounge, in which the bands Sleigh Bells and Salem nibbled on pesto-chicken sandwiches while gazing out at the Hudson river.

In this room I ate a slider and sat down with a press release, hoping it would answer a few questions. For one thing, how exactly was The Creators Project designed to support and encourage artists? It wasn't giving out grants or scholarships. It wasn't holding competitions or classes. The project's outreach seemed to consist mainly in a website and a series of parties, with Intel providing backing and Vice culling content. The project seemed better designed to publicise art than to encourage its production, though the website promises to allow "millions of viewers from across the globe to virtually participate."

The press release was vague and so seemed the enterprise, which, it dawned on me, is probably the point: to lodge a formless but sticky alliance of the Vice and Intel brands in the minds of young maverick types. To graft some of Vice's urban hipsterism onto Intel, which in turn validates Vice with its aura of capable PC chip-making. Or something along those lines. What I ended up seeing was not a rebirth of either brand, nor the widespread empowerment of nascent artists, but a vision of what happens when guerrilla marketing and social networking meet mega-corporate funding. Results so far are undetermined.

"The Creators Project" will launch in London, Sao Paulo, Seoul and Bejing over the course of the summer

~ MOLLY YOUNG