i just finished 'experiencing' the new music video for trey songz's "touchin, lovin" which premiered earlier today via buzzfeed (naturally packaged with animated reaction gifs at the end of the article). apparently i unlocked 36% of trey's fantasies while doing so (such fantasies included... butterflies flying around an attractive woman?). the prospect of learning of the other 64% has me so tantalized that i had to watch it again immediately. just kidding, it's actually completely terrible and boring.
this is not the only such video. the video for coldplay's "ink" (as basic and mor as the song is, it's probably my favorite from that mostly-boring album) is 'powered' by the same interlude technology behind trey's and thus lets users click to choose between 2 to 3 selections at various points throughout the video. though this is supposedly done to influence the direction of the video's narrative, i've watched it twice making radically different selections each time and typically the choice made little-to-no difference in how things played out. but there are yet other recent videos of this sort -- arcade fire's "reflektor" lets you influence the direction of a visual effect that overlays on the video (expect near-constant buffering unless your internet connection is superlative), and bob dylan's "like a rolling stone" lets you cycle through many tv channels, which will display people on the various channels' tv shows lip syncing to the song. despite everything this is probably the best one i've seen. there are probably others too but i can't subject myself to any more for now.
how long will it take before this nonsense falls out of favor? i suppose the rationale is to make these videos more 'immersive' or to personalize the experience for each individual viewing (also cf pharrell's '24-hour' "happy" video), and yet for the most part these have been extremely rudimentary and clunky. the 'experience' of constantly waving a cursor over the viewing space in anticipation of some moment when your mostly-arbitrary input will be solicited is actually rather antithetical to immersion in my experience thus far. but considering more video-viewing is now occurring on tablets and other touchscreen-enabled devices and the possible emergence of popular simulation entertainment technologies in the coming years (oculus rift, sony's project morpheus etc.), i suspect these gimmicks won't fuck off quite yet. and if not, will they progress to the point where the videos actually feel innovative artistically? i am not particularly hopeful for now but stranger things have happened.
(also itt feel free to post examples of such videos you have happened upon, whether they are actually interesting or just profoundly empty as a result of their gimmickry.)
― dyl, Monday, 1 December 2014 23:44 (ten years ago)
this trey songz one appeared to have no gay fantasies so i stopped watching
― J0rdan S., Tuesday, 2 December 2014 05:28 (ten years ago)
xp ikr i kept clicking on him hoping he would start touching himself or something
― dyl, Tuesday, 2 December 2014 05:34 (ten years ago)