def.sound’s”Trill.Allah”;an interactive music video experience by Mike Leisz and Leila Jarman (Los Angeles,US)

For interactive web video, click HERE.

For Vimeo video, click HERE.

Los Angeles based rapper and one of L.A. Weekly’s Artists to Watch in 2017, def.sound,and acclaimed new media artists and filmmakers Mike Leisz and Leila Jarman’s latest collaboration comes in the form of an interactive music video.

About the work:
For this video, interactivity was a way to bring the music forward. Mouse input reframes the viewer as an instrumentalist and allows the video to serve as a kind of synesthetic musical accompaniment. Mike has always been fascinated by small corners of the internet that interrupt our daily browsing and where HTML, keyboard, and mouse are suddenly transformed into tools of creative expression.

We chose the browser as the medium for Trill.Allah because its capability for user input and code based anatomy allowed us to get near infinite visual results. The visual canvas, programmed in JavaScript, is a simulation of a basic analog video feedback system, where a camera is pointed at a TV that is also displaying the cameras feed. However, it was important for the song that the human performance and lyricism be kept in focus. def’s performance idiosyncrasies and the rhythm of the track are fed back into the visuals, determining their colors and quality and creating a hypnotic void where the lyrics can stand at the forefront of the video.