Extract from Google Chrome and Interactivity: The Wilderness Downtown
A visual analysis by Jessica Grandío Fra, for "Media Analysis", Aalborg Universitet, June 2011
NOTE you will need to run the website on Google Chrome or otherwise it will not work as its creators expected.
My first step on the visual analysis of The Wilderness Downtown will be trying to discover if the whole creation has a tendency to be “real” on the standard of Kress and Van Leeuwen modality markers or, if on the contrary, the project aims to sketch the reality of suburbs (the last Arcade Fire production The Suburbs, as its name predict, is organised mainly around the idea of western suburbs) in a hyperreal, over exaggerated, depiction of the American way of life.
Not every modality marker has the same importance here; some of them (as the articulation of tone, colour saturation or modulation) seem to be of less use than others. The most important modality markers that should be used to analyse this composition are mainly the degree of articulation of background and details. This is due to the fact that the whole interactive clip could be said to be focused on three different items, two of them aiming to be real, personalised and local. These three items are animated images from Google Street View, a constant runner that is supposed to represent the web user, and certain animations that merge with the previous ones.
If we first take the articulation of background we can divide it in two different areas: the runner and Google Street View images. On the first the background articulation appears to score “low”. This might occur for one specific reason: the runner intends to be the user. A great articulation of the area or neighbourhood where he is running would make this identification more difficult. We, as users, may find the suburbs as the places where our childhood might have been spent. To enhance this feeling of personalization and add a sense of local contents, the articulation of background scores “high” when we analyse Google Street View captions. We are supposed to be watching in high definition our own neighbourhood, the places where we used to play. The use of music, video and animation aims to make both levels (low background articulation on the runner and high on the maps) merge in only one sensorial input, a runner—that might be us— exploring hopelessly the place where he used to live and dream. On the analysis of the articulation of details we find the same dichotomy: the area where we find the runner, and also the runner himself, is not really thoroughly detailed, allowing us to recognise trees, walls and an endless road, but being generic enough to permit us feel that were are this particular runner. We can not see his face, we just know he is a human, we might, as humans, feel like him. The total personalization and identification of the user comes when 3D images of Google Street View start appearing and mixing with the runner. What the director Chris Milk seems to achieve in The Wilderness Downtown is a series of users that can find their own neighbourhoods represented and be emotionally close to the desperate runner which We used to wait portrays.
As long as we are talking of a multimedia creation which combines video, audio, text, drawing tools, 3D mapping and the active participation of the user I will consider The Wilderness Downtown as a temporal composition. It means that the thread that unites all the pieces which give shape to the whole is rhythm (Kress; Van Leeuwen 1996: 183). Music is what connects every pop-up window, making invalid the notion that different windows would act as framing devices which would separate different sets of ideas. Video and map captions are also connected through animations that link one to the other, but mainly is the tune and the lyrics the device that makes the whole composition run smoothly. Salience, in my opinion, is not achieved in general by any of the areas of the creation, not only one is given more importance than the others. This is a side effect of using pop-up windows which contents move according with the tune and change over time. The only object or subject which achieves almost total and constant foregrounding is the runner; he is the central piece of the composition. However, even this position is challenged once in a while by the continuous movement of other pop-up windows and the role that animations play all along the music composition. It is also important to note that the most foregrounded figure, the runner, is the only one—if we do not take in account the animations—that does not add new info to the user. The only purpose that can be inferred from foregrounding him is, again, appealing to the identification of the individual, connecting this with the appealing to the local (3D mapping).
Finally, if we try to analyse how vectors are used in this composition we can get even to a contradiction as long as more than one direction is pointed at the same time by the images and animations. The runner is during, almost, the whole performance running toward us, like trying to escape from the imprisonment of the screen, this pattern is maintained even when animations start appearing around him or even intruding his space. But on the other hand the patterns of appearance of both the runner and the animations mix quite chaotically and direct the user attention to different points of the screen at the same time, making the runner lose prominence. A sense of confusion on the audience is created due to this, in addition, randomly the runner unexpectedly changes his direction, breaking –maybe consciously and with a purpose—the audiovisual rule of the 180º. This transgression only adds more confusion to the absence of a fixed pattern of vectors and the hopeless feeling that the music searches to achieve on the user.
As a whole artistic creation The Wilderness Downtown takes advantage of the new tools that the Internet gives both to users and creators to blurry the edge between both concepts. Now on that project the users can become authors and make their postcards andvideos available for other users. The user is not longer a passive receptor of informational inputs but collaborates and in return gets individualised contents that make The Wilderness Downtown become a highly differentiated project from other
music videos. The aim is not only to act as publicity for Arcade Fire but to prove, both technically and artistically, that Internet has still much potential to offer if users are willing to collaborate in the creation in addition to the sharing tradition moment that we seem to be living.
WORKS CITED
Crampton, Jeremy W. “Will peasants map? Hyperlinks, Map Mashups and the future of information” in Turow, Joseph; Tsui, Lockman (eds) The Hyperlinked society: questioning connections in the digital age. (206-226) Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 2008
Kress, Gunther; Van Leeuwen, Theo Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design London: Routledge, 1996
Landow, George P. Hypertext 2.0 Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997
Machin, David Introduction to Multimodal Analysis New York: Bloomsbury, 2007
Bruns, Axel “Distributed Creativity: Filesharing and produsage” in Sonvilla-Weiss,
Stefan Mashup Cultures (24-37) New York: Springer-Verlag/Wien, 2010
ELECTRONIC RESOURCES
Google, Arcade Fire confused on HTML5 Adrian Roselli 1/09/2010
What the Arcade Fire’s Wilderness Downtown Experiment Can Teach Journalism 03/09/2010 Josh Stearns
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