Arcade Fire play Columbiahalle, Berlin, November 2008. Photo credit: U2 005

The Arcade Fire’s new interactive music video marks an innovative end to the traditional MTV experience as we know it.

The Arcade Fire’s new music video is proving quite the maverick. Rather than a straightforward, sit-and-watch experience, the Arcade Fire has commissioned an online interactive film to accompany their track “We Used to Wait.” In doing so the Canadian seven(-ish) piece band has “breathed new life into the medium” of music videos according to the Guardian‘s music blog.

The “video”, directed by Chris Milk and entitled “The Wilderness Downtown”, begins by asking you to enter the address of where you grew up. It then (in association with Google and dubbed “a Chrome experiment”) incorporates the streets of your youth into the animation. If the area of your misspent is available on Google Street View you will be transported back there while the song plays, or, as Music Mix puts it: “It will incorporate moving images of that exact area into the journey of [a] faceless jogging avatar (you! One American Apparel hoodie and it could be you!) at its center.” You are then invited to write a postcard to your younger self, “(I know, I know. Barf.)” cringed Gawker.com.

“Say what you will about the indie-goth aesthetics and the irritating, aggrandizing treatment of histrionic middle-class teen angst,” (as James McMahon for the Guardian does) but the “film” has been well received across the board. It manages to hold appeal both for Arcade Fire fans as well as their detractors, and it is of particular interest to the technologically savvy because, as the PC World blog headline put it: “Google and Arcade Fire Collaborate on the Geekiest Music Video Ever.”

Even if they’re not interested in the music, techies are in a whirl over the site because it demonstrates the tricks and twirls of HTML5, “the next evolution in coding.” In certain lights the whole project can be read as a Google ad for the powers of HTML5. “The homepage for the Google experiment details how HTML5 within Google Chrome makes interactivity possible,” explained PC Mag, “specifically, the SVG path drawing tool creates branches of your words depending on the force of your mouse movements.”

Those who hate the Fire (McMahon, for example, “can’t stand” them) are still visiting the site and contributing to the viral marketing. McMahon wrote: “I’ve already shared it with hundreds of my friends. Thanks to making the website’s animated hoodie run around the grounds of Doncaster Rovers Football Club … it’s forced a tune I would otherwise have little desire to hear into the recesses of my brain.”

Of course the fans and those who already hold tickets for the band’s up-coming stadium tour, are delighted by “The Wilderness Downtown.” “It’s hard not to feel manipulated and slightly thrilled,” attempted Lilledeshan Bose on the OC Blog by way of explanation. “It sounds like I’m exaggerating,” implored The Lost Boy on Indie Wire, ”but its honestly one of the more emotionally stimulating uses of technology I’ve ever come across.” However, he does caution, “make sure you close all your other applications first cause its a bit of a crash monster.”

“The Wilderness Downtown” is a long way from the first music video that was shown on the first day of MTV nearly 30 years ago (“Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles, shown August 1, 1981). This is a development defined as much by technology as anything else. As Sir Arthur C. Clarke put it: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” perhaps we’re there already.