A darling of the Wikinomics blog (1,2,3), Radiohead has impressed before, and with their latest video for House of Cards, they do so again.  Maintaining their promise not to make any conventional music videos for their anything but conventionally released In Rainbows, the band’s latest video was made using Geometric Informatics and LIDAR (think radar, but with light) technology normally reserved for geographic mapping and catching speeding cars, among other things.

Radiohead chose to shun the traditional camera and lights video (that’s so 2007) in favour of the Velodyne LIDAR system, which used 64 lasers, shooting 900 times per minute in a 360 degree radius to capture the data for the video, which would later be re-assembled to create the four and a half minute sequence.  The final product perfectly captures the eerie tone of the song and in the words of the video’s director, James Frost: “In a weird way, [the video] is a direct reflection of where we are in society – everything is data…Everything around us is data-driven in some shape or form and we’re so reliant on it now. Our lives are so digital, so in that way, it felt apt.”

And the video itself is not even the coolest part.  Radiohead has made available the data used to make the video (here) and is encouraging fans to download, remake and post their own version to the YouTube group, which “the band would love to see”.

Kudos to the “video’s” production team and to Radiohead’s front man, Thom Yorke, for once again pushing the envelope and as he says himself: “using technology in a way it wasn’t meant to be used.”

Check out the making of the video here.