Milivoj Ilic is the son of Yugoslav émigrés. He was educated at Reading Grammar School, and Bulmershe College where he studied film and drama as an undergraduate. He is currently living and working in London.
After leaving college, Ilic became an advertising director and directed commercials for Absolut Vodka, Mambo, Samsung, Surfers against Sewage and Ford amongst others. In 1995 he created his first examples of video art in collaboration with Chris Springhall under the name Doublehead. Together they created ‘Living Portraits’: a series of filmed portraits shot on 35mm and encoded onto compact laserdisc. The portraits were funded by the Gulbenkian Foundation and exhibited at the Cubitt Gallery using the first plasma screens and portable DVD players in the UK. In an interview for Wired Magazine, the duo explained their vision of a future where flat-screen televisions would replace picture frames as spaces for exhibition in the home. They predicted that moving image art would become the dominant medium of the 21st century.
In the following year, Ilic and Springhall collaborated with Transport for London to test the feasibility of what they called moving image posters on the London Underground. Prototype displays were built and tested. ‘Chinese Whispers’ from the Living Portraits series was exhibited on the prototype, but the project was shelved due to safety concerns. It was feared such arresting moving images would cause congestion on the platforms.
Ilic and Springhall parted company in 1998 to pursue their different ideas of moving image art. Ilic went on to create the commercially successful ‘Funky Oil’ on DVD. His creative work continued to be wedded to technological development, collaborating with French Connection on the largest ever moving image street projection on London’s Cromwell Road. The project was never realised, the authorities feared the installation would be too much of a distraction for motorists. Undaunted, Ilic continued developing the principles explored in Living Portraits by creating ‘Sophie Moving Photographs’.
Lucrative licensing deals were secured with the BBC and Virgin Atlantic for the use of Funky Oil which helped fund the creation of the DVD Pop Art label: O art. Ilic described O art as the first moving image art label of its kind. Its purpose was to create moving image art for distribution and sale through retail outlets at affordable prices. As well as continuing to create video art, Ilic hoped to sign other video artists to make video art albums on DVD.
In 2003, Ilic collaborated with mobile communications provider 3. Launched the previous year, 3 was fast becoming the most innovative of the mobile phone network providers. Ilic suggested ‘3’ create video art which would automatically play when the phone received a call. He created three prototypes: ‘Fly’, ‘Geist’ and ‘Hot Lava’. Due to battery drainage, ‘3’ decided not to incorporate the prototypes into their products.
Ilic continued to create work intermittently, experimenting with online platforms Vine, Steam and Minds, before creating a new series of video portraits called ‘360 Portraits’.
Currently, Ilic is developing a series of three feature-length films. He intends to fragment the films after completion so the films may serve a multitude of uses and escape the cinematic experience. By recycling the films into an NFT, a physical accessory, video installation, a banner, an icon, product, a false god - something to be buried with - it is the artist’s desire that the ideas expressed in the films will become appropriated, reshaped, reinterpreted and essentially liberated from the artist’s original intentions. He is also creating still and moving image art on a number of online platforms under a pseudonym.
