Chris milk is an innovative digital artist. He is the technical and artistic mind behind digital collaborations such as The Johnny Cash Project and Arcade Fire’s interactive and nostalgic music video, The Wilderness Downtown. The Wilderness Downtown project is a prime example of potential in HTML5 as an artistic platform, rather than a generic and passive webpage. Milk’s abstract use of HTML5 depicts the power and innovation of the updated platform.. It enables complex systems of browser windows to open.
These windows are coordinated and timed to pop-up-open, then closed in sequence. Some windows allow the user to interact with the multimedia within them using the cursor (one prompts the user to write a letter to their past-self!). Particular windows contain multimedia that uses data from Google Maps. The interface asks the user to enter their childhood home address information at the start of the sequence. It inputs that information into Google Maps software, extracts data back from the Google Maps software and reinterprets it. This reinterpretation of the information is displayed as a personalised video of a character running through the streets and roads of the user’s childhood address. Using Google Maps and Street View, combined with film and visual effects, bound together with complex coding, Milk creates an interactive nostalgia-inducing augmentation of Arcade Fire’s first UK single, “We Used to Wait”.
A deeper inspection into his other artistic feats can be viewed here.