Chris Milk

The Exquisite Forest

The Exquisite Forest by Johnny Cash allows users to connect, collect and collaborate ideas from one another, by collectively sharing and telling branches of stories and scenarios. The idea was to make a forest of sharing ideas almost like a network, which allows people to improve storytelling as well as improving their creative skills. With its creative commons licence it allows the users to share and adapt work freely, hopefully making a forest of creative ideas who are unlimited to growth around the remix culture.

BIO:

"Beginning his career in music videos and photography, Chris Milk’s work has expanded beyond the traditional: his art straddles experimental genres and unfamiliar mediums, turning new technologies, web browsers, ephemeral events and even physical gestures into new found canvasses.

Milk first gained recognition as a music video director, working with Arcade Fire, U2, Kanye West, Green Day, Johnny Cash, Gnarls Barkley, Chemical Brothers, John Mellencamp, Courtney Love, and Modest Mouse. He has been honored with the top industry awards for his music video and commercial work, including the Grand Prix Cannes Lion, the D&AD Black Pencil, the Grand Clio, and SXSW's 'Best of Show’, as well as multiple Grammy® nominations, MTV Moon Men, and the UK’s MVA Innovation Award. His short film Last Day Dream played at film festivals around the world, and he directed the second unit of A Mother’s Promise, the film that introduced Barack Obama at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards recognized his work in design and art in 2011.

In recent years, Milk has focused on using cross-media innovations to enhance emotional human storytelling, exposing the beauty in the things – physical, digital, intangible – that connect us all. The Johnny Cash Project and The Wilderness Downtown with Arcade Fire take the intensely personal, emotive power of music and use breakthrough technologies to create a visual experience that is interconnected to a global consciousness while still being individually meaningful and moving for each participant. The Wilderness Downtown was named as one of TIME magazines 30 Best Music Videos of all time, and was exhibited at MoMA in NY for 6 months in 2011. Milk partnered again with Arcade Fire in 2011 for Summer Into Dust, a kaleidoscopic, crowd-fueled installation that physically connected the audience and thier collective emotional response with the band and their performance at Coachella, widely credited as the highlight moment of the festival.

The Treachery of Sanctuary, currently touring the world with The Creators Project, is a large-scale interactive triptych: a story of birth, death and transfiguration that uses shadows of the participants’ own bodies to unlock a new artistic language. This Exquisite Forest is a collaborative online piece that turns branching stories into an endless forest of animated narratives. It is currently being exhibited at the Tate Modern in London."

- milk.co/bio

I find Chris Milks work and ideals influential, i love his balance of user engagement and his place as a designer. He almost gives power to the users hands, although we can still argue that consumers are not in complete control, Milk shows that user productivity and engagement are just as important. He shows these characteristics in his works such as, "The Exquisite Forest" and the "Johny Cash project".
In "The Exquisite Forest"(left), Milks collaborative project showcase the users creativity and the power of collective thinking and sharing, like branches that connects each and story.
Similarly, the "Johny Cash Project"(bottom) although in a point seem linear, Chris Milk allows Johnny Cash fans to collectively edit and render each video frame of his music video.

Johnny Cash Project

We can "contribute" to Chris Milks, by rendering and editing frames from Johnny Cash's music video, in memories of his death. People/users, specially Johnny cash's fans are encourage make their own versions of frames to be then collectively remixed into one illustrative music video. Given the tool to say something, the users are able to connect to the song much deeper than the original version. By allowing the users to do this, Chris Milk builds a deeper and stronger bond with his audiences. This is what he believes is to be the future of music videos and other media, through audience collaboration. This is what i saw to believe as the perfect balance between the user and the designer.

Provided with a few/limited drawing tools Johnny Cash encourages users to create something extravagant and cool by showing off past users creating using the same tool.
With the tools provided I can only use opacity of strokes, black and white colours, tracing tool, undo button, zoom button and types of strokes.

Only provided with a few set of tools I manage to illustrate something like this. After i edited the frame, the frame then is mixed with the hundreds of other frames that other users has created. Once you are done you are given an option to edit another frame.

Each tree represents difefrent story line, you can make your own tree by creating a new story line or you can always build of from another users story by adding a branch to their tree.

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