It sounded like a horrible idea at first.

Is it the nineties again? Aren’t we done yet with CD-ROM? “Interactive movies”? Someone’s seriously making art out of fucking pop-up windows? Come on, say it: multimedia is baaaaaaack!

Still, seriously, there’s a lot to like in this Arcade Fire clip/interactive movie by Chris Milk/Chrome Experiment/HTML5 Showcase. The deal is that it uses Google Earth and Google Street View imagery to “personalize” the clip, not through cheesy superimposition, but by creating and moving windows around, quite like split-screen techniques used in movies or in 24.

It’s an immersive experience – while it can run in the background and not disturb you, the point is that you’ll stay and watch – yet not as immersive as a true full screen show. For instance, you can still see part of your desktop – the Dock, the menu bar, a couple windows and icons hanging around. Because of that, it acts more like a a parasite than like a program. For instance, I’m having the whole show running again while I’m typing.

Another thing of note is that this whole post-modern-with-screens-everywhere experience has no center. There’s no master window staying in the middle of your screen running all the scripts and spawning the pop-up windows (well, technically there must be one, but none was really apparent). I like that; the spontaneity it simulates, your desktop come to life with birds and streets and windows and music.

Obviously it’s a novelty, a technology showcase and an elaborate marketing play (you can write a postcard at the end of the video, which might be distributed at shows for promotion). But it’s a good thing that that this kind of frills gets tried again and again, that people still try to explore every possible means of expression. HTML5, Flash, pop-up windows, apps, whatever. Technology’s irrelevant, what matters is the grammar within.