SXSWorld
Issue link: https://sxsw.uberflip.com/i/654465
4 2 S X S W o r l d | F I L M / I A M A R C H 2 0 1 6 | S X S W. C O M qual parts artist, entrepreneur, inventor and humanitarian, at barely 40 years old, Chris Milk has already worn quite a few capes. His creative incarnations include photographer, music-video director, digital installation artist, virtual reality storyteller and, now, VR film collaborator and rainmaker. "My objective is to reach people in ways that haven't been pos- sible before, and we're seeing that all over the VR landscape," Milk says. "Stories make us who we are, but there's always been a transla- tion process. The external story needs to be internalized one way or another. VR is different … VR is inherent internalization. Direct feed into the consciousness." Milk's latest co-ventures — Vrse and Vrse.works, a VR tech company and production studio, respectively — are pushing the new frontier of immersive, "spherical" filmmaking to create visceral interactive narratives, you-are-here documentaries and musical/ visual collaborations that incorporate many of Milk's own innova- tions (e.g., the head-shaped, 360-degree binaural recording device he invented for the "Sound & Vision" VR concert with Beck in 2013). Milk's roster of creative partners and clients reads like a who's who of tech, film, music and journalism: Google Chrome, Oculus Rift, The New York Times, the United Nations, Apple Music, Vice news, Saturday Night Live, DAVOS luminaries and Spike Jonze, not to men- tion music artists including U2, Norah Jones and Gnarls Barkley. For the fourth year in a row, Milk's VR works were showcased at Sundance this past January, as part of its New Frontiers exhibit. Among the most popular was Milk's interactive installation, "The Treachery of Sanctuary," the largest exhibition at the festival. Other Vrse-related works at Sundance 2016 included Milk's VR doc Waves of Grace, about an Ebola survivor in Liberia, created in conjunction with the United Nations as part of an ongoing series between the artist and the UN. Diverse as his repertory might be, the unifying thread is Milk's sense of compassion for his fellow homo sapiens, regardless of where they live or what their conditions. His goal, Milk has said, is to affect change — real, global, humanitarian change. Big goals. And whether it be joint projects with the U.N., such as Clouds Over Sidra, a VR documentary film about a 12-year-old Syrian ref- ugee in Jordan, or his collaboration with Jonze and Vice on the VR doc Millions March, chronicling the 2014 protest against racial pro- filing in New York City, Milk believes that VR as an art-form can literally unite us. "I like to look at the stages of life," Milk said of his perennial preoccupations. "Birth, life, death. We're pretty much always at odds with our mortality, because it's still so mysterious. We're born, we don't know why. We stick around for a while, we don't know why. We die, we don't know why. Technology is all about expanding our reach, right? So I see art as a method to expand our understanding. I'd like to understand why I am, why you are. This is just my way of figuring things out for myself." Some of Milk's most startling pieces have taken the form of joint projects with bands, such as Arcade Fire. Set to the group's song, "We Used to Wait," the interactive web piece "The Wilderness Downtown" (which won Best of Show at the 2011 SXSW Interactive Awards) asks the participant to enter their hometown zip code, which opens a window to satellite imagery of said town, then, based on the user's notes to his childhood self, or his doodlings on the screen, multiple new windows open showing him running through the streets of his native town. "We're stuck somewhere between biological and cosmic com- plexities, and it all comes back to my attempt to understand all of that. Are we more than the sum of our experiences? What kinds of emotions will be stirred when you see your hometown through a new lens? I suppose Wilderness was an early attempt to put you, the viewer, inside the story. Something that ultimately led to Vrse." The most recent spin-off from Vrse is the Vrse app, which debuted last year. Milk describes it as "an extraordinary storytelling tool in virtual reality" and mentions that it was the second-most- downloaded Google Cardboard app last year, per Google. Naturally, because Milk's art is so enmeshed with new tech- nology, he often fields questions about how these new media actually unite people when they're accessing these works, however ethereal and life affirming, from the confines of our own worlds. Are tactile means of communicating and creating art headed for extinction? Not at all, the artist says. "Books, newspapers, magazines, sculpture… those are all rungs in the ladder of humans shaping the way they interact with their world. Computers, phones, VR technology… electronics are just another rung in the ladder. Technology isn't evil. Technology is technology. A pen is a piece of technology. Hate letters have been written with pens, but so have love letters. It's what we do with the technology that matters. We're using VR to bring people closer together." T "A Conversation with Chris Milk" will take place on Wednesday, March 16 at 11am in Salon A at the Hilton Austin Downtown. This session is part of the VR/AR program track, which is open to all SXSW badgeholders. See schedule.sxsw.com for more information. Chris Milk Shows How VR Films Can Bring People Together by SherMakaye baSS E Ch ri s M il k