Ever wanted to be the star in a music video? Now you can! In some way… To fully appreciate the experience of today’s video I strongly suggest not to press play on the embedded version you can see above but to go on donottouch.org and follow the instructions you’ll see on your monitor. The site will record your mouse pointer and put it inside the video.

This video is a great example of how directors can create engagement in their audience making them participate to the actual making of it, which is a much more effective and fulfilling experience than just passively watch the same clip.

With the Internet pervading almost every aspect of our lives, the distance between creators of contents and their audience has become a lot shorter and I think this trend will not change at all over the next years. As you can see, we are still at a basic stage, artists are still experimenting the mechanics to allow interaction between the crowd and the creator. The music video is a perfect medium to make this kind of experiments but maybe sooner or later the technology will allow us to interactively participate to the creation of movies or pieces of music (ninja tune is already working in that direction with its iOS app Ninja Jamm).

But Kilo is much more than a simple interaction experiment, it’s also a nostalgic artwork about the decline of that extraordinary invention that allowed common people to easily interface with computers: I’m obviously talking of the mouse.  Now that touch screens are almost everywhere (it won’t take too long for you to have one of them on your fridge too), it’s nice to honour that weird device that allowed users not to be forced to write code to take advantage of the amazing possibilities of computers.

Thank you Douglas C. Engelbart, we’ll never forget what you did for us.