Reflektor: Arcade Fire’s digitally interactive music video by Google Chrome
Back in the August of 2010, the internet savvy alternate-rock band from Canada, Arcade Fire; released the first HTML 5 powered music video for their single, “We used to Wait”, with the help of Google Web Developers. It was an instant hit among netizens across the globe.
So, when they released their new music video “Reflektor”, in collaboration with filmmaker Vincent Morisset and the Data Arts team at Google, helmed by Aaron Koblin, much was expected.
The video is an interactive digital experience that encourages viewers to co-create parts of the music video using their mobile phone or desktop. With Arcade Fire’s Reflektor playing in the backdrop, the viewer can direct the visual projection, which combines physical control via mobile device and hardware accelerated video effects. The artist in the video, Axelle Munezero is revealed through a spotlight that moves in time with your mobile phone.
It all starts, when you launch the site in Google Chrome and you receive a unique code that syncs your phone to the video experience in real time, where any phone movement transforms the story through an array of lighting effects, video transitions and alternate angles. There is even a video collage at one point.
The music video scene has hardly been a digitally advanced affair and has quite so stuck by the textbook MTV cubicle. So, it was nice to see Arcade Fire offer us an interactive and dynamic music video by accepting digitalization as the future of it all.
The song is foot-tapping and sings of a generation of virtual “friends” and questions the notion about social media sites like Facebook and Skype bringing us closer together.
What is however strange is Butler’s lyrics questioning the digitally connected world:
We are still connected/But are we even friends? We fell in love when I was 19/And now we’re starting at a screen. Our love is plastic/We’ll break it to bits
And all this, to address high-tech users and the whole cloud smoke of “Staying Connected” that social media sells us on, while we take an effort to log in to Chrome, connect our technologically advanced phones to our computers and enter codes, just to experience the very same video. Ironic?
You may check out the video at: http://goo.gl/tqqN14
