The music video has gone through some major evolutionary changes over the years, from MTV to the YouTube boom arguably started by OK Go, and a new interactive video that has sprung up online this week offers a potential peek into the future of the format.
A Netherlands-based band has a viral hit on their hands thanks to an online music video described as being ‘crowdsourced’, but instead of asking for funds from fans, they’re asking for people’s mouse cursors.
The new music video is essentially an interactive game that tracks and records your mouse pointer’s movements in a series of activities and instructions, then adds each subsequent play-through to the finished video, resulting in a swarm of pointers that move (mostly) in unison to the soundtrack and various on-screen instructions (go check it out now at donottouch.org – caution, there’s some NSFW bits in there). “We are celebrating the nearing end of the computer cursor with an ever-changing music video where all our cursors can be seen together for one last time.”
The soundtrack to the new interactive video is ‘Kilo’, the new single from Dutch band Light Light, The bandcamp page for the 3 min pop nugget describes Light Light as formed in 2011 as “a marriage between sleazerockers zZz and folk noir minimalists Saelors. Their shared love for trippy lo-fi instruments and psychedelic sonic experiments gives a new meaning to the term “super group,” with a debut album “expected soon.”
The new online video, which features over 13,000 buzzing cursors at the time of publication, was produced by Roel Wouters and his team at Moniker, a design studio based in Amsterdam. Moniker took some clever tweaking of Javascript to make the program and capture users’ mouse movements in real time, the video is recomposed every 30-60 minutes with the additions of the most recent users, as TechCrunch reports,
Credits at the end of the music video (seriously, go to donottouch.org and have a play) explains the interactive video is designed as a tribute to the mouse pointer. “After 50 years of pointing and clicking, we are celebrating the nearing end of the computer cursor with an ever-changing music video where all our cursors can be seen together for one last time,” reads the credits.
The death of the mouse pointer and the birth of a new medium for music? Maybe. But it’s certainly one of the cooler viral videos in recent memory (and not a single LOL cat in sight, impressive!).
You can view a comparison between the early stages of the music video and the current swarm of pointers that now inhabit it below.
