The Wilderness Downtown: A Digital Narrative
By Daniel Sedlacek
The Wilderness Downtown is a groundbreaking interactive music video created by Chris Milk. The experience uses Google Maps, Street View, and features made possible by HTML5 to give the viewer a brilliant symphony of visualizations in sync with the music that allow every user to relate to the song in a distinct and intimate way by using elements that permit the audience to choose the setting, project themselves into the narrative, interact with the visualizations, and ultimately connect their memories to the song.
The creator Chris Milk first gained recognition in his career as a music video director by working with artists like Beck, Courtney Love, Jack White, Kanye West, and Modest Mouse. Eventually, he began to feel that no music video could truly give the same personalized experience that listening to music by itself does. When we listen to it every day, music starts to become a soundtrack for our lives. We begin to connect songs with memories; with periods in our life. Twisting the lyrics to fit our own personal meanings. Milk felt this wasn’t possible with an ordinary music video because inherently it was too rooted in someone else’s vision. He wanted to create something that had equally soul-touching emotional resonance that pure music does… and he did.
The multimedia video experience is set to the song “We Used to Wait” by Arcade Fire, the first UK single from their third album “The Suburbs”. Frontman of Arcade Fire, Win Butler said this about the inspiration for the song in an interview with NME;
“In high school, I had a letter-writing romance with a girl. I was trying to remember that time… waiting an entire summer, pretty much half a year, the anxiousness of waiting for letters to arrive. All day every day there’s almost this cloud of feeling hanging over everything. We’d [his family] be in Maine, I’d walk down to the post office and come back… the whole day was consumed by that feeling.”
This shows us what the song meant to Butler from his perspective. Broadly the song is a melancholy melody that looks back in time without idealizing the past. The meaning and the emotions the song envokes aren’t lost through the experience of The Wilderness Downtown but are personalized to each individual making the lyrics fit with their own experiences .
The front page of the site is rather minimalistic. Black and white excluding a small orange sun. The left corner of the screen contains the top of a tree with leaves gently rustling in the wind. Small flocks of simple origami style birds dance across the scene. The title is a font that strongly resembles the roots of trees which is consistent thematically. Below the title, you’re told to enter the address of the home you grew up in. This is where the interactive experience truly begins. Once you hit ‘begin the film’, your browser opens multiple windows on your desktop each containing different scenes or sequences, as “We Used to Wait” by Arcade Fire begins to play. The first window is a video of someone wearing white shoes running down a paved road in time with the music. The video continues to reveal a featureless person dressed in a hoodie running down the middle of a nondescript street in an unidentifiable area.
This ambiguity allows the viewer to follow the narrative while maintaining the ability to project themselves on to the character as the song continues. It lets people disconnect from the video just enough to take in all the elements of the site; immersing themselves further into the experience and unknowingly becoming more emotionally invested.
Suddenly a new window appears with the same paper birds from the front page as Win Butler sings,
“So I never wrote a letter. I never took my true heart. I never wrote it down.”
These folded paper birds represent the thoughts we have that that we never wrote down or told anyone. The thoughts that were left unsaid. The choices we never made. The person you never told how you felt. When the song reaches the end of the first verse and Butler sings,
“So when the lights cut out. I was lost standing in the wilderness downtown.”
A new window opens on top of them all and shows a top-down view of your neighborhood as you seemingly float above it getting a top-down view through the use of Google Maps. Birds begin to fly underneath and you see the hooded figure running down the street, minuscule from so high up. Right at the end of verse two, the character stops running and starts turning in place, the Google Maps top-down perspective and Street View shot begin to rotate along with the figure.
Placing you back in familiar spots from where you grew up further fostering that individualized sentimental connection to the piece. Subtly weaving the lyrics of the song with memories of your childhood by pairing the visuals of places you remember from growing up with the lyrics and melancholy sound of the song. As the bridge begins, every window disappears except the Google Maps perspective which starts zooming out. Then as the third verse begins and Win Butler sings;
“I’m gonna write a letter to my true love. I’m gonna sign my name. Like a patient on a table. I wanna walk again. Gonna move through the pain.”
A new window appears that prompts the user to write or draw a message to them self in the past. This element causes us to reflect on our past and think about what we would say to them. Then three windows that simulate the mechanisms of a typewriter appear beneath the window. These are both to evoke a reaction of reminiscence and a greater emotional connection by allowing the audience to contribute to the visuals and further building their own personal experience with the song. At this point, most people will find it hard not to become overcome with nostalgia.
The symphony of new windows continues without much change until the outro of the song. The birds begin to dive down at the hooded character crashing into the streets of your hometown causing roots to burst from the ground and sprout into trees that cover the top down view in foliage.
Ending the narrative in a way that aligns with the tone of the song and themes in the lyrics but it symbolically significant as well becasue the birds that represent the things we never did or said begin to crash down and grow ‘roots’ (A term many people use to refer to where they came from.) Growing into trees and covering your hometown. The message here is those things we regret or long for in the past are what build up our memories and ultimately our narrative of our past experiences.
In conclusion, The Wilderness Downtown’s use of its format, visual imagery, and Google Maps/Street View. Allows every user to relate to the song on an intimate and distinct level by using elements that accomplish Milk’s goal of creating a music video that gave the same personalized experience as enjoying music by itself.
Try the experience yourself by going to
Or watch an example here:
