Interactive Art

Artists:
Masashi Kawamura (JP), Tomohiko Koyama (JP), Hiroki Ono (JP), Qanta Shimizu (JP)

URL:
http://sour-mirror.jp/

SOUR/MIRROR is an interactive music video for the Japanese band Sour. It collects your personal data through Facebook and Twitter and personalizes the animation to each different viewer.

The song MIRROR is about the fact that everything and everyone around you is a mirror that reflects who you are. You can find out who you are in those reflections of others. This lyric gave us an idea of a journey to find yourself through your connections with the friends and people online.

We developed this idea of creating an interactive music video by collecting all the different data on your social networking sites and using them as a platform of entertainment. The experience begins on your browser and transforms your desktop into a performance stage.

In this video, by connecting to your Facebook, Twitter and the webcam, every viewing experience will be customized based on your social network status. You will be taken on a personal journey with the band, through all the different day-to-day sites you visit, such as Google Search, Google Maps, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and more. In order to engage fans and increase their participation from an early phase, we successfully raised the production budget through Kickstarter and also allowed the Twitter followers of @SOUR_official to automatically become a part of the color pixel in the actual film.

When the site was launched, it gained over 150,000 viewers in just the first three days. Most users spent more than three minutes on the site, which is an amazing number for a microsite. Two thirds of the visitors were accessing from outside Japan, proving that this video has created buzz around the world, which is a big achievement for a Japanese indie band.

More Information will be provided.
(c) 2011 Ars Electronica