Rare is the press release that fails to include number of views, hits, downloads, honors or mentions that a spot has received somewhere online. The importance of such distinctions as "YouTube's #68 most viewed entertainment video of all time" might mean something to someone somewhere, but it's hard for a viewer to find meaning in such stats without a sense of the overall picture.

When Capitol Records approached Blip Boutique, an LA-based prodco founded by seasoned video director James Frost and former Capitol and Virgin Records creative director Mary Fagot, to create an unconventional video for Interpol that would live primarily online, the duo pitched the idea of using "data mapping" technology to artfully animate metaphysical structures and statistics, such as the number of people blogging about the post-punk four-piece at a given moment in time.

As an art form, data mapping marries information with design aesthetics to make the invisible visible, from bus schedules in Minneapolis to the Internet and Federal Aviation Administration flight data.

Though tracking blog chatter about Interpol is entirely possible, Fagot says, the data proved too time-consuming and expensive to track down. So, Blip collaborated up with Aaron Koblin, the San Francisco-based visual artist behind the FAA data maps, to use computer code to animate a series of evolving "systems" - cellular, urban and solar - for the song "Rest My Chemistry" .

"I first saw [Koblin's work] online. I have a fear of flying so whenever anything involves planes, I'm there," says Frost. "The FAA data is beautiful - as a visual art piece, it's amazing, but then when you realize every single dot that's mapped was taken from real data from the FAA in real time, it becomes lot more complex."

The process of converting these "systems" took four and a half months, a lot longer than Blip initially thought. Koblin asked for as much reference material as possible - movies, photos, object files and numeric data - and then used his own proprietary software written especially for the project to interpret the data and process it into minimal lines and patterns. Blip then gave all the clips to Light Assembly editor Roger Scott to stitch together a narrative.

Due to the complex nature of his programming, Koblin wasn't able to replicate or change what he'd rendered, meaning fiddling with the images was near to impossible. He also made up some of the data, further abstracting the end results and putting more of the onus on Scott to create a cohesive structure.

When asked if the clips wound up resembling what she imagined, Fagot laughs. "Aaron was designing a new language, which we had to learn to communicate within," she says. "Once we learned that, the video ended up visually looking like something we understood. But before, we didn't know the language, and had really expansive ideas. All the ideas we were coming up with were utterly possible and that makes it really, really exciting, but you have to narrow your scope a little bit."

As a director, Frost sees endless possibilities for data mapping, from representing political affiliations and areas affected by climate change to more superficial data, such as who's listening to Interpol and where. "We're so used to doing work that's aesthetically instantaneous by looking through a viewfinder in a camera, so having to let go of that control to give into the unknown is what's challenging," he says. "With this video, there was a rewarding sense that we were moving into different areas to see what's possible with moving imagery."