The Wilderness Downtown came out last summer as a music video for The Arcade Fire song ‘We Used to Wait’ but nobody knows who Arcade Fire is anyway so I doubt anyone even noticed so i’m gonna blog it to you right now. The Arcade Fire teamed up with Google and artist Chris Milk to create an interactive video for their song ‘We Used To Wait’ and it was so good that it became known as: ‘The Interactive Experience: The Wilderness Downtown,’ Incidentally, ‘We Used To Wait’ was on that Arcade Fire record that won a grammy that made everybody really angry because they hadn’t heard of Arcade Fire and Justin Bieber hadn’t won or something.
The Wilderness Downtown is really cool and actually made me like Arcade Fire a little bit. To clarify, I had heard of the Arcade Fire before the grammy’s but I wasn’t really into them AT ALL. I mean, not even slightly. Now, I think ‘We Used To Wait’ is an OK song but the Wilderness Downtown almost catapults it to 30 Seconds to Mars levels in terms of epic videos. I probably won’t be downloading it and listening to it on my Ipod anytime soon though. I’ll definitely be watching the Wilderness Downtown a couple more times though.
Like 9 eyes – which I featured last week – the Wilderness Downtown makes use of Google Street View to give you a guided tour of the neighbourhood you grew up in and then invites you to write a message to your younger self in a font that looks kind of like a tree branch. It also utilises multiple windows opening up all over your desktop so is actually kinda scary as well. Maybe haunting is a better word and probably encapsulates the feel of The Arcade Fire and their song ‘We Used To Wait’ a bit better. I would advise you close down all other programs when you’re watching The Wilderness Downtown too because it does take up a lot of processing power. Check it out below:
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