HTML5, JavaScript, Google Maps’ Satellite & Street View imagery software

The Wilderness Downtown, an experimental interactive music video for Arcade Fire’s “We Used to Wait,” personalizes the song’s theme of nostalgia and recovery in the face of relentless change. Before the song starts, the Web-based platform allows users to enter the address of their childhood home. The resulting video is a montage of pop-up windows displaying Google Maps images of the selected neighborhood—aerial views, panning street shots, individual houses—spliced with images of a hooded figure running along the pavement as flocks of birds swoop overhead. The graphics respond and move to the music, as if choreographed, and at the song’s climax, the video takes a uniquely personal turn. The Wilderness Downtown was designed specifically for Google Chrome and was built using only open-source methods, applying the most updated browser technology to recreate a poignant walk down a digital memory lane.