Chairlift’s video for "Met Before" is a quantum romance.
So you’re suddenly attracted to someone, trapped in a nauseating, tangential game of circling around the beautiful pseudo-stranger until the only choice is appoach or run- perhaps for something better. Chairlift’s new video allows both: the payoff of seeing each dazzling/tragic outcome. The video begins with the bicurious Caroline Polachek (vocals) and her PhD classmates in a quantum theory course, the professor explaining:
And this says because we don’t know where we are in space and time, we are actually spread out across these different universes in which we exist. So this means that anything that can happen, does happen. And that, instead of being PhD students here, maybe in another universe you’re rockstars.
So goes the story. The interactivity here is distilled into the agonizing moment of hesitation—do you approach her/him? Use the arrow keys to step toward, away, or laterally.
The decision tree is complex and cohesive–never does the decision seem wrong. The results can be harrowing–an important discorvery in either personal romance or universal science, i.e. “the neural underpinning of deja vu.” Play the interactive feature above, or spoil most of the conclusions below.
