Photo Credit: Chris Milk, 2015. Retrieved from Wikipedia on March 27, 2019.
Chris Milk, innovator, immersive artist, director, and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of the AR, VR, and XR production company Within (formerly Vrse). Through his work with Within (and even before), Milk has been a pioneering leader of VR artistry, production, and creativity.
It is Milk who termed virtual reality as “the empathy machine”. He believes it to be the final medium we will have, and the greatest possible in terms of experience. It’s the “lightning in a bottle”, as he puts it, that turns our own senses into the canvas of the story. If used right—assuming and hoping that the technology continues to progress and gain further traction in terms of accessibility—he intends to use this medium to help us be “more human”.
Chris Milk began his career as a director of music videos. It was derived from his childhood love (and perhaps obsession) with music. He wanted to see if he could expand on the awesome power “raw” music had by layering on imagery. While it had some impact, it wasn’t enough. This inadequacy sparked a creative journey. He explored through many collaborative projects different ways to bring in further engagement from the viewer, and therefore deepen the experience.
Some of these earlier projects included The Wilderness Downtown (2010), The Johnny Cash Project (2010), 3 Dreams of Black (2011), The Treachery of Sanctuary (2012), and The Exquisite Forest (2012).
The Wilderness Downtown still. Retrieved from milk.co on March 27, 2019.
The Wilderness Downtown was a in-browser video experience made in collaboration with Google that took a music video and made it close to home, literally. The user could input their street address and the imagery would overlay over footage from Google maps, to make it appear like it was happening right outside your front door.
The Johnny Cash project was a crowdsourced animated music video. Participants were provided a single image template to draw their own personal take on the image using embedded drawing tools on the site. This was then used as a single frame in the video for the song “Ain’t no Grave”.
The Exquisite Forest title card. Retrieved from milk.co on March 27, 2019.
The Exquisite Forest was an interactive play on exquisite corpse. Through the project site, different base prompts were given and users could create short animations to build on that prompt and grow the story. Single ‘leaves’ could be continuously added to or new ones could be started.
Photo of The Treachery of Sanctuary installation. Retrieved from milk.co on March 27, 2019.
The Treachery of Sanctuary was a triptych installation made to guide visitors through what Milk views as the creative process. It presents a story of birth, death, and metamorphosis that the views experience using their bodies.
While each of these had great success in their own ways (almost all of them receiving multiple awards and were installed at various museums, such as Tate Modern in London), Milk was never fully satisfied. They never attached that primal magic he was striving for. Finally, he discovered virtual reality—the answer he had been looking for—and has relentlessly pursued the new tech frontier ever sense.
The work that Within has produced has received numerous awards and special recognition. These works include Evolution of Verse (2015), Clouds of Sidra (2015) and Waves of Grace (2015). Within has partnered with the UN on a few projects to help in humanitarian efforts.
Related Links & Resources
- www.With.in
- www.milk.co
- TED Talks:
- @milk
- Vimeo
- Article: Why Chris Milk believes standalone VR will be a watershed moment