The Wilderness Downtown by Chris Milk is in my opinion one of the most interesting creative developments from the world of Digital this year. It’s a fantastic example of what can be achieved by the passionate resistance, who are fighting against the juggernauts like Chris Anderson for the belief that browsers do still very much have a future with the web.

In short, it’s an interactive browser based music video for the song ‘We Used to Wait’ by Arcade Fire -  nothing new there, but there’s no Flash buttons to toggle here. The scene is of an external setting with only a lone, unidentified figure running through the environment. However, by using multiple viewpoints, the video/ app/ experience populates the area with content fed straight from Google Maps and Streetview. After selecting the address of your childhood home at the outset, it becomes apparent that the protagonist is you, running home and stopping outside your old home.

After a short interlude were you draw a postcard (more info on the postcard here), ‘you’ begin to be chased by birds and rapidly appearing trees – which I gather to be an artistic metaphor. The multiple viewpoints each contribute just enough to fill in the gaps, including a very impressive display of 3D animation being overlaid onto Streetview.

It’s a beautiful, new and truly inspiring piece. I find it a fantastic standard bearer for the power of Chrome and HTML 5. Sure the browser is losing more and more of it’s purpose to apps which suit the menial tasks better, but it’s making way for more new and exciting possibilities.

The Microsite Curse

In spite of this, there is still the argument that these sort of productions rely on microsites, which are in essence a waste of space and time – cut-off from the rest of your online content and seemingly existing in a bubble from the rest of the web. They’re a nice gimmick, but they’re like the kid in school nobody wants to be friends with, in spite of his efforts to draw as much attention to himself as possible. Could this be shared? Could it be passed through Facebook as something more than just a link to the microsite, or hosted on Youtube without having to leave the page you’re on? Maybe browsers will forever exist as the explorers and distributors of new found ideas, always being the first to burden the new technology. Or maybe they’ll just be the stop-gap these developments use while they get themselves sorted out and ready for a proper launch to the wider internet.