Alondra: Post 1

When you think of the words art and science, many people separate the two. Although in some cases the two may differentiate from one another, there is an intersection that can be used to produce creative and inventive pieces. Chris Milk is an artists who pushes those boundaries to create such work.

Chris Milk is an American entrepreneur, innovator, director, photographer, and immersive artist. He is founder and CEO of Within, a virtual reality technology company, and co-founder of Here Be Dragons , a virtual reality production company. Milk began his career in music videos and photography, creating videos for artist like Gnarls Barkley, Arcade Fire, U2, and one of my personal favorites Kanye West. As his music videos received more popularity and views he began getting recognition as an artist, being honored with the top industry awards for his music video and commercial work.

Milk did not just stop there, he later began experimenting with new genres by using new technologies, web browser, and physical gestures into his installments and creations.

One is his more well known pieces is “The Treachery of Sanctuary,” a large-scale interactive triptych. It is a story of birth, death and transfiguration that uses shadows of the participants own bodies. A special installment of “The Treachery of Sanctuary” was featured at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. The installment consists of three 30-foot high white panel frames suspended from the ceiling on which digitally captured shadows are reprojected. A shallow reflecting pool sits between the viewers and the screens.  In the background, an openFrameworks application uses the Microsoft Kinect SDK for Windows. 

Another interesting piece is “The Wilderness Machine”, which is the physical extension of the online piece The Wilderness Downtown.  This machine generates postcards from the handwritten notes created by viewers of the interactive film (The Wilderness Downtown). Each postcard is a person writing to their younger selves. The machine uses a suction arm to transfer a blank postcard to a metal podium where a mechanical pen is programmed to reproduce the original pen strokes. Then, a claw arm tosses the postcard out of a slot in its Plexiglas casing.  Each postcard has a unique code that allows a random recipient to return to the website and write a digital postcard back to the original sender.  It is basically a modernized version of the message in a bottle concept. The postcards are printed on compostable seeded paper, which when planted will grow into birch trees, in the hopes of recreating the end of the digital piece in the real world. The machine has appeared at Arcade Fire concerts, the Wired Magazine pop-up space in NYC, and the 2011 Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier exhibit.  

Artists like Milk are beginning to change the way the world looks at science and art by acknowledging its intersection. With this collaborative and explorative mindset, artists are developing newer ways to produce work and be able to turn what began as a simple idea into a complex installation.