A Stunning App That Turns Radiohead Songs Into Dreamscapes by Liz Stinson.
From the post:
There’s something about a good Radiohead song that lets your mind roam. And if you could visualize what a world in which Radiohead were the only soundtrack, it would look a lot like the world Universal Everything created for the band’s newly released app PolyFauna (available on iOS and Android). Which is to say, a world that’s full of cinematic landscapes and bizarre creatures that only reside in our subconscious minds.
“I got an email out of nowhere from Thom [Yorke], who’d seen a few projects we’d done,” says Universal Everything founder Matt Pyke. Radiohead was looking to design a digital experience for its 2011 King of Limbs session that departed from the typical music apps available, which tend to put emphasis on discography or tour dates. Instead, the band wanted an audio/visual piece that was more digital art than serviceable app.
Pyke met with Yorke and Stanley Donwood, the artist who’s been responsible for crafting Radiohead’s breed of peculiar, moody aesthetics. “We had a really good chat about how we could push this into a really immersive atmospheric audio/visual environment,” says Pyke. What they came up with was PolyFauna, a gorgeously weird interactive experience based on the skittish beats and melodies of “Bloom,” the first track off of King of Limbs.
Does this suggest a way to visualize financial or business data? Everyone loves staring at rows and rows of spreadsheet numbers, but just for a break, what if you visualized the information corridors for departments in an annual (internal) report? Where each corridors is as wide or narrow as access by other departments to their data?
Or approval processes where gate-keepers are trolls by bridges?
I wouldn’t do an entire report that way but one or two slide or two images could leave a lasting impression.
Remembering the more powerfully you communicate information, the more powerful the information becomes.