Chris Milk Transforms Beck's "Sound and Vision" Performance Into Psychedelic Interactivity

If you think of some of the great concert films, like Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense or Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii they’re notable for being both experimental and for the way they treat the audience. Demme’s film features David Byrne’s eccentric and conceptual onstage antics, while only recognizing the audience via the noise they make and Pink Floyd’s film, shot in a Roman amphitheatre, features no audience whatsoever.

Following in this tradition is Chris Milk’s 360 degree interactive concert footage for Beck—except his film gives the audience control over how they see this live performance. The online audience at least, anyway. Filmed using 360 degree cameras on a circular stage surrounded by a 170 piece orchestra, it gives the viewer options to view the concert from different perspectives as Beck covers David Bowie's “Sound and Vision”.

So, you get to choose what 360 degree camera you view the performance from, then navigate around the space using your mousepad. Or, if you allow the application to access your webcam you can replace the mousepad with your head to move the camera up, down, left, and right. As well as this you also get to warp the perspective (which is the most fun part), by choosing Little Planet or Black Hole and zooming in and out to create some really funky viewpoints. All in all it makes for a very unique, practically psychedelic, way of watching the performance.

Check out some screengrabs from the experience below:

Find out about one of Chris Milk’s previous concert experiments, his collaboration with Arcade Fire, in our video below…

@stewart23rd