Music

Learn more about the interactive glowing orbs from Arcade Fire's Coachella performance

by Nicole Villeneuve

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It’s a trick that might have looked a little something like the hyper-colourful deluge of balloons that Flaming Lips have been unleashing on crowds for a while now, but the large glowing orb-balls released during Arcade Fire‘s Coachella performance of “Wake Up” this weekend were filled with more than just confetti.

A collaboration with director Chris Milk (who the band also worked with on their “We Used to Wait”/Wilderness Downtown video) as part of the festival’s Creators Project this year, the “Wake Up” finale beach ball-things were embedded with LED lights and infrared transmitters to “paint light all over the audience.”

The whole thing was entitled Summer Into Dust. From the director, Chris Milk:

A crane positioned at the top of the stage was set up to let the balls drop during the band’s last song, “Wake Up,” and our job was to throw them into the crowd and make sure they stayed there. There was also a giant cage to the right of the stage filled with hundreds more that we were responsible for tossing into the audience, which proved to be no easy task given that they were an unwieldy two or three feet in diameter. When the the balls finally did drop, the entire place turned into an epic ball pit, with these giant balls flying all over the place, changing colors all the while from red to blue to orange to pink. (My apologies to the people in the front who may have been pummeled in the face with a beach ball or two—my bad!). Standing on stage and taking it all in, it certainly was a sight to behold.

Anyone who nabbed an orb and took it home may have noticed a URL on it—it’s a portal to the ongoing online part of the project, where users can log in and, ahem, connect their balls, so to speak.

Read more about the execution of all of the Creators Projects collaborations on their blog, and re-watch the video of “Wake Up” below.