today a friend on facebook made a status comment about the arcade fire’s new film clip for ‘the wilderness downtown’. so of course, i had to check it out.
it’s a piece of technological beauty – a chrome based interactive film clip that situates the running, the circling, the flying in your childhood street and suburb. you enter your childhood address and it loads up a unique film clip for you, drawing on google map’s satellite and street view technology.
i put in my childhood home address – it knew my street, my area name, even the postcode. but then it told me it didn’t know enough. there wasn’t enough information to give me a past, to make my wilderness downtown. my childhood doesn’t make the cut for google technology.
but my childhood wasn’t set downtown, it was in the actual wilderness of sorts. a farm, many kilometres from a town, on a road that was only asphalted once i’d left in the nineties for adelaide. you couldn’t see the house form the road, just apple trees and then some.
Major thanks for the blog article. Much obliged.