Incorporating HTML5 (with the aid of Google Labs), the Canadian indie-rock band, The Arcade Fire, released this short interactive "film" ahead of their 2010 album. When you enter your (childhood) address into the search bar on the main page, you're treated to a music video that uses your childhood home to illustrate the track's nostalgia and sense of loss/change. Listeners were encouraged to submit letters to their youthful selves and those heartfelt postcards were sent across the country in addition to being incorporated in the band's live show via video projection.
I highly encourage all of you to check out the site/film for yourself. I was just exploring the Walt Whitman archive which, for whatever reason, called to mind this project and I knew I had to share it right away.
So cool, thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteneat! not really related, but here are a couple projects that manipulate text in interesting ways:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.itsbeenreal.co.uk/index.php?/wwwords/writing-without-words-book/
http://www.understanding-shakespeare.com/
http://ciid.dk/education/portfolio/idp12/courses/data-visualisation/projects/silenc/
(I think these were done with the Processing program language. No idea how the different types of text were marked up.)
Probably an obvious point, but I'll mention it since I ran up against it: The film necessary adopts the politics of Google Maps (a politics based on a number of factors probably not considered "key" for the video itself).
ReplyDeleteI grew up in an isolated rural area, so the address of my home (and the addresses of all the schools I went to, etc.) return this message: "Your address doesn't contain enough Street-View and/or Google Maps data to 100% enjoy this experience. You may want to try another address, or the name of your school and its town could work as well."
This seems like a good illustration of the split between Bogost's levels: While from a coding perspective the project runs "successfully" with or without the complete Google Maps data, at a different level that lack of data ruins the "point"--the sense of nostalgia, etc.
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