This morning, Google announced a collaboration with the band Arcade Fire and writer/director Chris Milk. Sounds weird, right? Well, the result of their work together is truly cool: a personalized, interactive music video experience constructed in HTML5.
You’ll do better to skip my description and check it out yourself. The gist is that, using Chrome or other HTML5-compliant browser, you enter the address of your childhood home and hope that it has some Google Street View imagery associated with it (sadly, none among my three childhood homes did!). Then you launch the experience, and sit back to watch.
Throughout the session, your browser opens, closes, and moves around several different windows containing different images. Often, the content in the windows will interact. At some point, the video incorporates satellite and Street View imagery from the address you entered into the experience. I don’t want to ruin the message or anything so, again, I suggest you try it out yourself.
It’s easy to fall into my regular pattern of painting this as pointing towards the “future” of music videos: personalized, social, interactive, etc. To be honest, I doubt it’s the case that all music videos will eventually resemble this. But it certainly is a compelling innovation, and points to a larger trend of crafting media to speak more directly to the user by soliciting their interaction.
The weird outcome of this trend, as with that in other “broadcast” mediums, is that we’re falling slowly away from the mass culture where we all experience the same exact content. What will this fragmentation of experience do to our culture? Is it good? Is it bad? Does it matter? Hard questions to be solved in the years to come…
