3 Dreams of Black: WebGL and the Urban Frontier

The latest WebGL video, written and directed by Chris Milk, for the song "Black" by Danger Mouse, Danielle Luppi, and Norah Jones, was produced in partnership with a team of Google designers. It is a stunning digital statement about the apocalyptic decline of American civilization in the twenty-first century. For the creators, it seems, both the iconic spaces of the city and the country in US history will be displaced by a virtual fantasy somewhere in between.

(You can watch a screen grab below, but for the full experience, download Google Chrome and visit the official website--the innovative technological form is an integral part of the film.)

First, a brief narrative summary--the majority of the narrative is composed of POV shots:

"Three Dreams of Black" opens with a video Cutlass Supreme speeding down a freeway, passing under ruined entrance ramps, overgrown with vines, and entering an equally ruined city. After camping out for a night in an abandoned apartment, the survivor (the viewer) drives further into the post-apocalyptic city, this time presented in 2D. Soon, though, the scene begins shape-shifting with colorful explosions of 3D life growing like cancers on the dull grey of the dead city's streets.

"Until you travel to that place you can't come back

Where the last painting's gone and all that's left is black"

In time with the second verse of Norah Jones's lyrics, we travel to a 2D version of the Wild West, riding this time on a train and looking out over a digitized frontier through the window created by the door. [255] A herd of buffalo pass by, but they quickly begin morphing into 3D grotesqueries. "We" climb atop the train as it travels through more rolling terrain of the West, and over what appears to be a oil spill in process, the same 3D grotesqueries quickly ravishing the countryside.

"At last those coming came and they never looked back

With blinding stars in their eyes, but all they saw was black"

The final scene of the film, the third dream, is an entirely 3D desert landscape, similar to the classic settings of spaghetti westerns--the "Rome" album is a tribute to the soundtracks of those old movies with a 21st century updating. This fully digitized scene announces itself as an artificially-engineered one, punctuated by the advertising and video iconography that populate the terrain. This time we follow a flock of birds into the final fade to black.

"And when you follow through and wind up on your back

Looking at up those stars in the sky, those white clouds have turned it black"

Norah Jones's elliptical lyrics provide us little insight into how the world ends, except that it is some vaguely Biblical punishment for the sins of humanity ("it was heaven sent," "punish my deeds"). There is further moral ambiguity in the meaning of the 3D interruptions throughout the video that appear to both deconstruct and reconstruct the early country and city scenes. On the frontier, the oil slick clearly represents topical and historical environmental catastrophe. The buffalo morph into the spill, linking 19th century and 20th century ecological degradation. Yet on the urban frontier, the 3D images embody nature reclaiming the fallen city in the form of explosions of green turf and galloping wild game. The third and final landscape, entirely in 3D, is presented as a utopian landscape of infinite play. Like the cowboys of the Wild West, we are free to romp at will among the rock outcroppings and video game characters. Digital technology--the cutting edge wave of which we are experiencing as the form of the film itself--is at once the cause and salvation of the end of the world as we know it.

Through WebGL technology, the user watching the film can manipulate the frame by moving the mouse around the screen. This effect enhances the narrative experience of the POV shots--moving the mouse is the equivalent of turning your head around as you drive through the ruined city of the future. Clearly, this an empowering perspective, especially given the decayed world in which the story us set. We might not have been able to stop whatever apocalyptic events happened, but we are now free to look around as much as we want. In the third and final setting, our manipulation of the screen is at its most potent and versatile. There, we can nearly turn the perspective 360 degrees and explore and direct the movement of the camera itself, approaching whatever strange objects on the horizon are of interest. In this way, the final scenes of the video can be different every time you watch it. It seems the argument is that it is in this artificially-realized terrain that we are emancipated from the failures of earlier historical epochs and landscapes. The city and the country have passed, web 2.0 is our final resting place.

(Here is a video about the making of the film:)

From the Corner to the Corner Office: Jay-Z's NYC

Jay-Z and Alicia's Key's song "Empire State of Mind" has become the new national anthem of New York City, displacing Sinatra's "New York, New York." As Jay-Z declares from the start, he is "the new Sinatra," paraphrasing his predecessor: "since I made it here, I can make it anywhere." Indeed, the song and video retell that classic myth of the American dream of the immigrant arriving in the city and, through hard work and determination, achieving financial success. In this version, though, Shawn Carter is the protagonist, as the rapper tells his own autobiographical, rags to riches story, growing up in the Marcy Projects to become CEO of Def-Jam Records.

At the beginning of the video, he raps about his origins in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn--"Yeah I'm out that Brooklyn...I'm out that BedStuy"--even referencing his former address of the Marcy Projects at "560 State Street." He makes several dutiful "keeping it real" claims to still be grounded and connected to that neighborhorhood: "I'll be hood forever" and"I brought my boys with me." But it is clear that Jay-Z is on the rise as his opening "Yeah I'm out of BedStuy" is quickly followed by "Now I'm down in Tribeca / Right next toDeniro." Much of the song consists of Jay-Z's boasting about the many new and exclusive places that his money and power can take him. Sitting courtside in Madison Square garden, he is close enough to trip a referee. "Empire State of Mind" is much more a celebration of these monumental sites and privileged points of view, than the democratic public spaces of New York City. [267]

Visually, Jay-Z's American dream narrative is told through his movement from the street corner to the corner office. Inthe earlier shots in the video, Jay is shot in street clothes singing on street corners throughout the city. From 2:35 to 3:20, though, when he raps the third and final verse of the song, we see him in the corner office looking out a large window over the city, the Empire State Building in the background. A second visual clue to Jay-Z success is the repeated aerial views of the city that also contrast the earlier corner perspectives. This is a powerful, totalizing view, one that can gather in the entire city in a single glance, or gas up the (private) jet and escape for a weekend.

As Michel de Certeau wrote of this top-down concept of the city from atop the World Trade Center, the corner-office perspective that Jay-Z cultivates in the video "makes the complexity of the city readable, and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text." For both De Certeau and Jay-Z, it is perspective that expresses, above all, power. It is literally, the viewpoint of corporate America, which hip hop moguls like Jay-Z have never been shy about celebrating (and perhaps rightly so). Just being there to take it in requires a certain level of access. But it also demonstrates a mastery of the city, a knowledge that one has successfully navigated the mysteries and dangers of the underworld. What such a view point denies is the validity of the million individual struggles of the democratic grid below, though Jay gives New York immigrants a brief nod in his second verse.

Alicia Key's repeated mythic chorus connects Jay-Z's story to the broader one of the American dream:

"Concrete jungle where dreams are made of,

There's nothing you can't do,

Now you're in New York!

These streets will make you feel brand new,

The lights will inspire you,

Let's hear it for New York, New york, New York."

In his second and third verses, though, Jay-Z qualifies this universal fantasy of urban opportunity. While he clearly things of his own experience in relation to the broader "melting pot" of the city, he first warns immigrants there are "8 million stories out their and they're naked / city it's a pity half of y'all won't make it." Then, he devotes the entirety to lurid stories of fallen women in the city. The bright lights that inspire in Key's chorus, for these women, are "blinding": "the city of sin is a pity on a whim / good girls gone bad, the city's filled with them." Like Crane in Maggie, Girls of the Streets, Jay-Z warns of the dangers of the city for a women who does not carefully navigate it's dangers.

(On the Blueprint 3 Tour, Jay-Z performed before a recreated New York City skyline on stage:)