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Jul 30, 2013 By Mike Hilleary Califone

Leading up to the arrival of their new album Stitches, Chicago’s Califone have unveiled an interactive music video for the LP’s lead single and title track. Developed by filmmaker Braden King and programmer Jeff Garneau, the audio/visual experience pulls imagery and GIFs from a select set of Tumblr blogs with no two passes of the video ever being the same.

According to a press release “the piece treats the images on-the-fly to give it a unified aesthetic and allows for user interactivity: if a viewer mouses-over an image, it is pulled to the top ‘layer’ of the image stream and its color returns. Click on a given image and the viewer can write a brief note on the back, which is then sent to califonestitches.tumblr.com and re-posted, along with the note or comment and a link to the originating source. Users can also reblog the messages they have sent to Califone.Stitches on their own Tumblr. All contributing blogs are credited on the About/Credits page and users can suggest additional Tumblrs for use in the piece via the site’s Ask interface.”

“A good Tumblr can make an emotional stream of consciousness visible in a very visceral way,” says King. “If you accept the premise that stories function as a way of ordering, synthesizing and making sense of our lives and experiences, these blogs, though primarily visual, represent a new kind of storytelling - a new way of ordering, synthesizing and making sense of our lives and experiences that transcends ‘once upon a time.’ To me, they illustrate the bleeding edge of narrative; a new kind of storytelling that transcends literature, plays and movies. Tim [Rutili]‘s song triggered the idea, the thought that maybe there’s a way to create a window into the emotional soul that lies beyond the surface plane all these blogs and images rest on. There’s a lot of humanity and emotion behind these blogs; people are using Tumblr to express themselves very honestly, directly and openly. I felt like we could create a way to wade into this stream of imagery and emotion that Tumblr’s users are sending into the ether to create an experience that reflected and honored Tim’s beautifully raw song.”

Click “show me your stitches” in the lower left hand corner on Califone’s Tumblr to experience the visuals. Stitches comes out Sept. 3.

(http://califonestitches.tumblr.com/)