Chris Brickler Dallas, Texas

A life spent on the seam between people and the machines built to serve them — the network, the picture, the therapy you can step inside, and the music underneath it all. Most people are asked to choose between making things and building things. That choice was never taken.

1970s

Pink Floyd. Proof that a machine could carry feeling — and that technology in service of emotion beats technology for its own sake.

1980s

Kraftwerk. The machine stops imitating instruments and becomes one. The cold thing and the warm thing were never enemies.

1990s

Business school, then the wire itself. One of the first large-scale commercial IP backbones in the country, a $100M agreement with AOL, and a seat on the integration team for the merger that formed Verizon. Youngest AVP in GTE's hundred-year history at 26; London at 27.

2000s

Having built the pipes, the work turned to what runs through them. Xlantic Media in Los Angeles — YouTube, Disney Imagineering, Nvidia, Intel — and an Emmy nomination in 2008, the year the Academy first admitted the internet was television.

2010s

Virtual reality. The screen stops being a rectangle you look at and becomes a place you stand in.

2020s

Immersive healthcare. Mynd Immersive: prescriptive VR therapy for older adults and Veterans, with the Department of Veterans Affairs, AT&T and Select Rehabilitation. Decades of technology, aimed at loneliness.