House of Cards by Radiohead, the videoclip shot with no cameras
As a post-rock group like it has always been considered, the English band of Yorke & fellows has a strong sense of experimentation toward the discovery of new territories, be they artistic or merely technological. The experiment of In Rainbows, the album offered on-line in digital format with free price or even equal to zero has deeply shaken a recording market embalmed as usual, and now Radiohead return to charge with a new “first time”, the hi-tech videoclip taken from one of the In Rainbows tracks.
House of Cards is the most melodic of the ten (wonderful :-P) tracks of In Rainbows but not for this it inspires trust and optimism, a couple of qualities that do not fit well to the daily apocalypse cadenced by the unmistakable voice in falsetto of Thom Yorke. A house-castle of cards that crumbles with dreams of normality of anyone, musical landscape selected for a video that in essence hasn’t been shot but assembled from digital data and faces and location scans.
“No cameras or lights were used” during the videoclip production, is stated on the Google Code page hosting the video and the project information. By using the tridimensional image processing software developed by Geometric Informatics and the speed sensors of Velodyne, the real images and locations were transformed into binary information that has then further modified to appear as a sort of wireframe instable world, on the point of disappearing in any moment and at last brought away by a whiffle of virtual wind.
Artistically valuable as you can expect by one of the most important bands - if not the most important, and here I’m talking as a fan but not even too much 
- of the modern musical landscape, House of Cards proves the will of Radiohead to not to stop with the In Rainbows experiment the discovery of the possibilities offered to artists by the digital world, be it Internet, the web or the most futuristic imaging technologies.
It’s interesting on the topic to see the making-of the clip, which shows a Yorke ruffled as usual and all the work that was needed to compose the final product. And that Radiohead want to experiment a more tight relationship with the fans following them on the Internet is proved also by the decision to put on-line for download the 3D data used to “shoot” the video never shot, granted under a Creative Commons license and exploitable to create personal visualisations.
These visualisations are manipulable through the Flash Viewer avaliable on Google Code too, and the band invites who would show the results of his creative efforts to add his video on the House of Cards group suitably opened on YouTube.
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