I discovered Chris Milk while I was walking home from work yesterday when I stumbled upon his TEDtalks video in my podcast feed.

In the video, Chris Milk describes his recent work to develop interactive experiences that incorporate elements of spacial reality to configure a screen that feels less like a screen and more like a window into another person’s life. He describes the powerful effects of interactive facial tracking navigation and 3D sounds and visuals that allow a user to feel a story and open a new inquiry for user experiences.

I couldn’t find his Evel Knievel video at first, but I was finally able to see Chris Milk’s production unite Pamela Anderson, Kanye West, and Curtis Mayfield. I followed the Milk trail until I arrived to the http://ro.me project. (It was worth switching to Chrome.)

I am so excited to find such an interesting visionary, and also someone that shares my same views on the rhetorical aspects of user experience in multimodal communication. I know how impactful a poem can read on paper, but I’ve experience something different when a poet reads it out loud. What is so powerful in that visceral register? Sound, smell, touch, or is it something metaphysical? Movies can set our emotions on fire with sound and picture, but what frames our perceptions of those experiences of sounds and lights is what ultimately revs us up.

I am excited to see what Chris Milk has up his sleeve for WebGL and I hope this technology can alter our current trajectory into apathy.