We don’t know exactly what to call the online collaboration between Arcade Fire and Google that launched Monday morning, but it sure is neat.
This “Chrome Experience,” as Google calls it, unfolds in multiple browser windows to the tune of Arcade Fire’s “We Used To Wait,” incorporating a viewer’s childhood address and allowing the viewer to write a letter to their younger selves using a nice, spidery font.
If music videos were invented for the web, rather than for television, they might look something like this. The project uses the web browser itself as an artistic medium, showing off the HTML5’s potential for interaction and multi-paned viewing rather than just using the browser as a frame for a plain, television-style video.
The whole thing works on a number of levels — in part due to the song’s lyrics, which are a paean to the analog days of writing letters and waiting for them to be delivered, speculating about what might happen if the electronic wonderland we’ve created for ourselves should disappear some day.
“I never wrote my true heart, I never wrote it down,” sings Arcade Fire’s Win Butler, “so when the lights cut out, I was lost, standing in the wilderness downtown.”
For now, the lights have not cut out — far from it. Instead, they’re bringing us ever more interesting fare, including this “web experience.” And yes, of course, you can share your version of the video with others, so they can see what you wrote to yourself and get to experience the project using your own childhood home as a starting place (assuming it’s in Google Street View).
This experience is really neat, as mentioned, but the deeper angle here is HTML5’s viability as an interactive platform for next-generation media experiences — a standard that Google and others seek to back as a response to Apple’s closed-down, curated iOS app platform.
“The project came about one day when [director] Chris Milk and I were talking about Chrome Experiments and what can be achieved through a modern web browser and with the power of HTML5 technology,” said Google Creative Lab tech lead and co-creator of the project Aaron Koblin. “We were excited about breaking out of the traditional 4:3 or 16:9 video box, and thinking about how we could take over the whole browser experience. Further, we wanted to make something that used the power of being connected. In contrast to a traditional experience of downloading a pre-packaged video or playing a DVD, we wanted to make something that was incorporating data feeds on the fly, and tailoring the experience to a specific individual.
“One of the biggest struggles for a director is to successfully create a sense of empathy with their characters and settings. Using Google Maps and Street View we’re able to tailor the experience to each person. This effect is a totally different kind of emotional engagement that is both narrative and personally driven.”
Milk, the project’s co-creator, who already had The Johnny Cash Project under his belt, told Wired.com that he sees vast potential in HTML5 for creating rich media.
“ is in its infancy right now, but I think the browser will be the next widely recognized artistic medium,” said Milk. “It allows such a larger dialog with the viewer. There’s actual two-way communication going on between the art and the observer.”
The next phase of this project sounds potentially even more interesting — a concept Milk refers to as “the message in a bottle scenario [taken] to its most unnecessarily complex technological extreme.” The messages viewers write to their younger selves as they watch could end up printed on actual postcards containing the seed for a real-life tree.
“The second level of social interaction, beyond just the observers and the piece … will unfold over the next few months as people are able to anonymously connect with each other through the postcards created in the film, and output through a number of both digital and physical mediums — one being the traveling ‘Wilderness Machine,'” added Milk.
“The machine itself is a bit of a surprise I’d rather not give completely away right now [but] the website provides a bit of a hint: ‘A postcard is created by an analog signal: you. This site takes that postcard and converts it to digital. The Wilderness Machine brings it back to analog. Look for it on tour with the band in North America. If you’re lucky enough to get someone else’s postcard from it, plant it. A tree will grow out of it.'”
We’ve watched the video a number of times, having been given early access by Google, and are happy to report that it’s a self-centered thrill to see your own home address featured in this well-constructed HTML5 video/experience/whatever. This self-centeredness is precisely what makes this “experience,” as overused as this phrase is, so “immersive.”
A word of caution: Several browser windows open and close during the video, so resist the urge, if only for a few minutes, to alt-tab over to your e-mail or any other browser window. We ran this “Chrome HTML Document” successfully using both FireFox and (of course) Google’s Chrome browser, but Microsoft’s Internet Explorer failed to run it — a failure Google pins on Microsoft’s insufficient support for HTML5.
“The experience should work in any modern browser that supports HTML5 technologies,” said a Google spokeswoman.
Even supported browsers don’t offer the ideal platform for an “experience” like this. Ideally, for instance, they would lose the window title information at the top and appear as unbordered video boxes. But as Milk says, HTML5 — which runs on any device with a modern browser, including smartphones, tablets and computers — is still in its infancy. “Experiences” such as this will evolve to look much slicker in the future, but already, they’re capable of some fairly incredible maneuvers, integrating Arcade Fire’s stirring music with data from Google Maps and Google Street View, topping it all off with input from the user.
We’re impressed, but some streamlining will be required if bands that aren’t big enough to play Madison Square Garden, as Arcade Fire is, are going to be able to offer it. We counted a full 111 names in the credits.
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