Arcade Fire have never really come across as being massively techie in the past, but with their new website they’re fast becoming the most future proof band around. The site is packed full of HTML 5 tricks and creative touches that fit in perfectly with The Suburbs, their new album.
If you don’t know what HTML 5 is, it’s the next generation of website language script, the fibre that makes website, and it’s going to make them more interactive than they have ever been. If you’ve seen any of the other big experiments into HTML 5 you will probably be massively impressed with its potential. From the flying balls that Google built into their logo last month or the ingenious Tipex video in You Tube, where the characters in the video interact with the rest of the webpage, HTML 5 has already started to change the face of the web.
However, Arcade Fire are surprise entrants to this wall of scripting genius, but they’ve done is very well. Moving you curser in the direction the flying birds in the background of the page makes them fly away in the opposite direction for a start, but if that isn’t enough to impress you, the digital personalisation of their song, We Used to Wait, is nothing short of immersive. You’ll be a little shocked by the results, but it’ll make you connect to the song and the album in a way that otherwise might not have been possible.
Called The Wilderness Town (www.thewildernesstown.com) the site was developed by writer and director Chris Milk in conjunction with Google’s own browser Chrome. It’s not just HTML 5 wonders that are on show, but a cinematic integration of this with elements from Google Maps and a cursor drawing tool that comes to life under the influence of HTML 5. Sadly, the site is no longer maintained, but it the time it was a piece of genius coding.
