#ntanglereview

Chasing New Jersey - DIY journalism 

Ellie Goulding- Lights (interactive video)

Arcade Fire - "the wilderness downtown"  (interactive music video)

Here is yet another interactive gem by the arcade fire. 

The Wilderness Downtown is an interactive music video directed by Chris Milk featuring the song "We Used To Wait" by Arade Fire. It was one of three Grand Prix winners at the 2011 Cannes Advertising Awards. In this piece, you’re asked to enter the address of the home in which you grew up. As the music kicks in, Images of your first neighborhood and child hood home are incorporated into the narrative of the video. Where a hooded runner sprints down the rain slicked streets of what is implicitly your old neighborhood.

The execution for this idea is flawless but its already a couple years old and is not aging well. i kind of wish they would have been able to make this with the tech thats available now. There are several parts of the video that use these jerky looking pop up windows as a narrative device and it feels kind of like my computer is having an anxiety attack. It's weird, check it out you'll see what im talking about.

Au Revoir Simone - Knight of Wands (interactive video coloring book)

This interactive music video from Brooklyn dream pop band " Au Revoir Simone " is one of the most charming toys i've played with in a long time. The whole piece has this great spooky vibe to it that seems to be steeped in this sort of odd nostalgia for childhood halloween TV specials. (remember "Halloween Town" or "Are you afraid of the dark?" ??)

The set up to the interactive element of this video is really cute and classic. The slender hands of a young lady lay an old timey looking story book onto a hard wood table. This estately looking tome with its aged, worn pages, and tattered binding are turned to a magnificently cute line-art illustration of the three members of Au Revoir Simone. The viewer then sets to work as the colorist for this lovely drawing using the tool bar on the left as a pallet (its kind of like using the bucket tool on MS Paint).

Moones - Better Energy (interactive drunk video)

 This is easily the most hillarious interactive video I have had the sincere pleasure of finding on the interwebs! Basically, the band "Moones"(hadn't heard of them either) decided to use an interactive platform to combine their two favorite things; Drinking and playing music!

As the user you get to control the camera angle and  the amount of beers the band collectively had before their performance! As the video begins the beer toggle is set to (0 beers) as the video plays you can up the anty to "20 beers", "40 Beers","60 beers", or the penultimate "80 BEERS"!. This may come as a surprise to my more pious follwers, but their hand eye coordination and general motor skills degrade as their Blood Alcohol Content  increases!!?! by the time you click "80 Beers" their basically just shouting and hitting eachother.  

Bob Dylan's Belated Interactive Masterpiece:

http://video.bobdylan.com/desktop.html

This bizarre and haunting interactive piece is the new (48 years belated) music video for Bob Dylan's seminal classic "Like a Rolling Stone". The interface for this video is designed to make the user feel as though they are channel surfing through a litany of disparate cable television networks; ranging from sports center to the home shopping network, where all of the on screen talent are seamlessly lip syncing the lyrics to Dylan's track. The user utilizes the up or down keys on their laptop to flip the channel at their own discretion. Personally, i lingered on the channel where the cast of Pawn Stars sings to me; but to each their own. 

I LOVE this video! when i heard that an official music video for "like a rolling stone" was to be released almost five decades after the songs initial popularity, i was skeptical to say the least. A lot of themes from this song are still incredibly relevant today. The feelings of angst, disappointment and resentment of the privileged that this song has come to represent are still very alive in the north american zeitgeist, maybe now more than ever. But this song is one that helped define the 60s, the flashy new technological tools available to video artists today would seem to suit the emotional landscape of this song ill.

However, using the aesthetics of channel surfing as the backbone of this video is a stroke of genius. To me it seems to draw a strong parallel between the lack of direction and character of "ms. lonely" and the lack of direction and character of north america's consumer culture. We are not a country that builds anymore (as was the case in 1965). We are a country that watches tv.(have you seen Scandal ?!) if you're an american child of the 90s (like me!) you for the most part have lived in a country with few hardships to over come. We have had no great and righteous war to rally behind, no networks of disenfranchised youth's standing up with a clear voice calling for real change (don't get me started on the occupy "movement"), we have all lived in a sort of lap or luxury (#1st world problems). Now that our country is facing real and serious issues that are even recognizable to the most uninformed citizens, do we as a culture possess the integrity to go out an scrounge for our next meal, to turn this boat around? Or will we just look for more elaborate distractions on our iPhones until its too late to do anything?