Music:Â Vienna studio LWZ used familiar computer icons and Google Maps motifs to create this music video that flies over an animated world for Austrian electronic duo Ogris Debris.
The film opens on an image of an earth being dragged onto a wastepaper basket icon by a computer cursor, introducing the video's recurring use of familiar digital symbols.
The perspective moves to an overhead of a landscape with raining Google Maps location pins and reclining peg men. Errant forks, teacups and knives are also shown plunging into the grass-covered scenery.
"We thought about those old shoot 'em up games where you fly over different worlds," said LWZ, which made the illustrations in Photoshop before animating in After Effects.
"We wanted to start our flight over some natural landscape and not dive into the weirdness right away," the team added. "But then we thought Google Maps has just such a massive impact on how we see the world today that it might just fit right into this setting."
"The idea that you can see via Streetview, read valuations and basically know so much about a place you have never been before is changing our perception of the world."
The film continues to progress through constantly shifting landscapes, where familiar features such as nuclear towers or roads are interspersed with unexpected motifs such as charging bulls and men sunbathing on roulette wheels.
The multi-layered images were designed to reflect the track's repetitive lyrics.
"We referred to the actual track the whole time – we also considered which part and which rhythm supports a certain scenery," the studio told Dezeen. "It's like creating a film to an existing soundtrack. The dramaturgy and the story were adjusted to the track."
Curtains part to reveal strange characters with Pinnochio-like noses puppeting crows in pages, before the film travels over a dark landscape covered in falling bombs and exploding buildings.
The studio first intended the film to depict a flying journey over a simple illustrated world, but became preoccupied with adding increasing amounts of detail.
"They wanted to make something thought provoking," said LWZ. "For us it was important to depict serious topics without being too finger-pointing."
"We had a really long shared doc with all kinds of topics that floated around in our heads," the studio added. "From current affairs to daily routines and the different perceptions of reality and our crazy world, everything was collected in there."
As the film draws to a close, it shows a forest of people brandishing selfie sticks and a mall packed with fast food topped by security cameras with snaking necks. The last scene includes some of the graphic motifs of the video repeated in miniature screens, reminiscent of browser tabs.
"We wanted to make this little parable of how we rather consume the world than actually experience it," said the studio. "We see the world through the filters of media."
"Tragic news, internet meme randomness, everything comes in through the same channel right next to each other and by scrolling through our timeline we think that we see the world, but in real life our field of vision is bigger than 16:9," it added.
See The World was released on 27 November 2015 by Affine Records.