it’s more of a visual art piece and not a proper video.  at first glance it looks a bit like a screen saver, so we have some background  below info to explain the concept and creation of the video. it’s featured today on youtube in the music section:
Here’s a link to the video for “Rest My Chemistry” http://youtube.com/watch?v=BgROCTkVHJY . Following is a bit of the back story and a q&a with the director to give the video some context.
A little bit ago, a visual artist named Aaron Koblin, who is a big fan of Interpol’s, approached his production company about making a video/art piece set to “rest my chemistry.” it wasn’t supposed to be a video per se, but the idea was that he wanted to use the technology/process he had been working on for creating his pieces to make a visual companion piece for the song – basically taking the lyrics to heart and creating a sort of digital map of the human experience from cels to person to city to world to space, etc. anyway, the production company approached us, we were into the idea and after a bit of time (basically because this takes a very long time to create the actual pieces as they are code and every change means writing all new code, plus aaron has been getting a lot of recognition in the art world and thus has had some art installations that took up time too) the production company got the finished piece and now it’s up on youtube.
Q&A with Blip about working with Aaron.
http://www.aaronkoblin.com/info.html
http://aaronkoblin.com/
Creative Directors : Blip Boutique
Production Company : Blip Boutique
Visual Programmer  : Aaron Koblin
Dynamics Programmer : Â Aaron Meyers
After Effects & Editor : Roger Scott for Light Assembly
How were you approached about this project:
We  wanted to do something for this song that was not specifically intended for broadcast, but that was more of an art piece that would live and grow primarily online.   We wanted to use a new technology using data mapping to create an abstract video.
Tell me about the inspiration behind the project/what type of story did you want to tell?
The story we wanted to tell came from the idea of body chemistry, as the song addresses sort of what one does to ones body and stepping away from that for a spell. Â So since we knew we wanted to do something with mapping data, we started thinking about body systems, and how we could expound on the idea of systems from the smallest to the largest scales. Â Therefore we decided to have the imagery reflect systems of particles within cells to cellular growth and multiplication to overall body systems, to city grids, to global mapping to solar systems, and back down again.
How did you bring this inspiration to life?
We worked with a visual artist, Aaron Koblin who we originally found through his data mapping project that used FAA data of flights in air to create these beautiful patterns of light. Â We asked him a lot of questions about how he generated the visuals he created, and started talking about what we wanted the visuals for this video to look like and how the very loose narrative structure should work. Â Then we started speaking about how to acheive this through supplying data, and references to what the final piece should look like. Â So there was a foundation of raw material to work from, and he created these incredible programs to translate data and actually draw over space and time in a style that we all liked. Â At this point the animation/after effects artist Roger Scott took over to give timing and structure to the piece.
Tell me about the software or tools you used:
Everything was created from scratch by Aaron, who programmed the mapping himself. Â Then Roger used After Effects to create the final sequences. It was a highly original authoring process, and a very complex one.
Any creative challenges?
It was definitely a challenge of communication. Â What we as directors saw happening in a visual sense was often much more complicated to create than one would assume. Â As the images were being created, it was not an easy share process as it was very time consuming to develop the imagery in the complex programming framework Aaron crafted, and to render it out so we could actually see what we were discussing. Â Therefore, for quite a long part of the development, all we would have to work with were words. Â Also because the programming was so complex, once it was rendered tweaks were not easy to implement as the basic programming that created it would be very hard to change. As a result, Roger was instrumental in translating our creative vision with Aaron’s images. So we all talked a lot.
