Barbara Sykes (artist)

Last updated

Barbara Sykes (Barbara Sykes-Dietze) (born 1953) into a family of artists, designers and inventors. Since childhood, she has produced work in a variety of different art forms. In 1974, she became one of Chicago's pioneering video and new media artists and, later to include, independent video producer, exhibition curator and teacher. Sykes is a Chicago based experimental video artist who explores themes of spirituality, ritual and indigeneity from a feminist perspective. [1] Sykes is known for her pioneering experimentation with computer graphics in her video work, utilizing the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Chicago, at a time when this technology was just emerging. Her early works broke new grounds in Chicago's emerging New Media Art scene, and continue to inspire women to explore experimental realms. With a passion for community, she fostered significant collaborations with many institutions that include but are not limited to University of Illinois, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College, Center for New Television, and (art)n laboratory. These collaborations became exemplary for the showcasing of new media work. The wave of video, new media and computer art that she pioneered alongside many other seminal early Chicago New Media artists persists as a major influence for artists and educators today. Her work has been exhibited internationally, at institutions such as Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (Copenhagen), Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York),   Museum of the Art Institute (Chicago), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) and SIGGRAPH. Sykes's tapes have been broadcast in Sweden, Italy, Puerto Rico and extensively throughout in the US, including "The Independents", PBS national broadcast, 1985, and national cablecast, 1984. Media Burn has an online selection of her tapes and over 200 of her raw footage, master edits, dubs and compilation tapes in their Independent Video Archives @ Barbara Sykes https://mediaburn.org/collections/videomakers-page/barbara-sykes/. Select grants include a National Endowment for the Arts and American Film Institute Regional Fellowship, Evanston Art Council Cultural Arts Fund and several Illinois Arts Council grants. In 2017, Sykes began to paint. In 2020, as the recipient of an Evanston Art Center Individual Artist Exhibition Award, Ethereal Abstractions, Sykes's first solo watercolor exhibition premiered 81paintings and she gave an online Artist Talk. Her paintings are lyrical, colorful abstractions reminiscent of organic shapes, ethereal forms and underwater landscapes - evocative impressions of spiritual and elemental worlds. They evoke the spontaneity and themes that have evolved from her previous body of time-based and digital artwork. In 2021, she moved to Florida. Her 2022 painting exhibitions/reviews include Forces of Nature showcased on the cover of Estero Life Magazine and she is in the article, Beholding Beauty: Artists of Estero Exhibit at COCO Art Gallery, the Florida Watercolor Society's 2022 Online Show, the 36th Annual All Florida Exhibition and Connections Art in Flight exhibit at the Southwest Florida International Airport, June 2022 to June 2023. She paints under the name of Barbara L. Sykes.

Contents

Early influences

In the early 1970’s, Sykes worked as a commercial silk screener and then as an offset lithographer. Bored with her career, she decided to start a new career in the electronic arts. From 1974 to 1979 Sykes studied at the University of Illinois Chicago, during which experimental video art was developing in Chicago. The Electronic Visualization Laboratory was started by two UIC faculty, Tom Defanti (Computer Science) and Dan Sandin (Fine Art), and was influential in developing computer graphics with the goal of creating video art. [2] The research lab known for developing the Sandin Image Processor, a video synthesizer is similar to synthesizers used to create music. The Image Processor allows for abstract analogue visuals to be created using analogue computer graphics, a new technology at the time. The lab was known for its Electronic Visualization Events (EVE), where live performances combined music and video processing in real time.

As a student of this new technology, Barbara Sykes quickly developed unprecedented skills using the Image Processor and produced a large body of groundbreaking work, that includes Sykes historically significant performances with Tom Defanti of The Poem during EVE I, 1975, and Circle 9 Sunrise during EVE II ,1976, at a time when such real-time performances were the first of their kind. [1] For EVE III, 1978, Sykes produced Electronic Masks and Sykes and Defanti co-produced By the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak and Duals together. Real-time computer performances continue to be vitalized at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. [3] Before earning an undergraduate degree, Sykes enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, SAIC, emerging video program in 1979, and obtained her MFA in video, computers and performance in 1981. [4]

While a student at the UIC, Sykes worked at their Media Production Center and as a freelance videographer and editor, producing dance, instructional and documentary videos. Concurrently, she was a UIC teaching assistant for graduate and undergraduate classes, providing instruction on the Sandin Image Processor, field production and editing. In graduate school at SAIC, she became proficient on the Rutt Etra Synthesizer and worked at the Video Data Bank co-coordinating Recent Work, a traveling video art exhibition, and documented visiting artists, including Ellen Fisher's performance, Call Her Amedia. She was also a broadcast post-production editor and cameraperson for a weekly Greek variety program that aired on PBS in Chicago and shot Chicago dance performances in order to fund her tuition. [4]

Career

Much of Sykes' work from the 1970s such as The Poem (1975), Circle 9 Sunrise (1976), Movement Within (1976), Reflections (1976), Off the Air (1977), Environmental Symmetry (1978) and By The Crimson Bands of Cyttorak (1978) utilized the Sandin Image Processor to create tapes as montages of meditative, poetic abstractions and her multimedia installations and interactive performance environments. While the nature of the Image Processor allows for limited analogue control, with much of the process left up to chance and experimentation, Sykes's mastery of the Image Processor distinguished her work from other artists in the field. Notable, her pioneering figurative tapes, Electronic Masks (1978) and Emanations (1979), illustrate the innovative work created solely using the IP's oscillators and editing. In 1977, Gene Siskel, film critic and host of Nightwatch, interviewed Sykes about her work and performance of Circle 9 Sunrise during this live television program on WTTW, PBS, Chicago.  Her later works evolved into lyrical video poems, mystical stories and experimental ethnographic documentaries that demonstrate more personal and expressive narratives and themes. They showcased her strength as a storyteller grounded with an aesthetic sophistication of great emotional depth that depicted the underlying sacred nature of the people and events portrayed. Shiva Darsan (1994) and Song of the River (1997) are among these works. Sykes created videos that "reflect her interests in female mythological figures, rituals, dance, art, and music of other cultures as well as depicting dream states and fantasized visions." [5] While this later work is different in process, there are clear relationships to her earlier work, as is evident in Electronic Masks (1976), which demonstrates a blend of image processing with themes of spirituality. [5]

Song of the River, shot in Borneo, was created during Sykes's 14-month sabbatical in research and video production throughout Asia, the Middle East and Africa. While there, she visited various indigenous tribes and was interested in learning about their spiritual relationships, and how these relationships are evident in everyday life. [6] In a statement about the film, Sykes describes that "from birth to death, special rights and ceremonies mark the important events of one's existence, assuring a symbiosis of body and soul with the divine. This deep relationship between the people and their gods are reaffirmed through daily activity. At times, the person symbolically becomes god, strengthening their own sense of sacredness and self-respect." [6] These themes are continued in Shiva Darsan, shot in Nepal, another video in her series "In Celebration of Life... In Celebration of Death..." Shiva Darsan discusses the Hindu god Shiva through a personal account of Sykes's visit to the Shivaratri Festival at the Pashupatinath Temple. [6] "In Celebration of Life... In Celebration of Death..." which was funded by a Chicago Artists Abroad Artist Residency and Columbia College, won several awards throughout 1994 and 1995 including the CINE Golden Eagle Award, First place at the Hollywood Spiritual Film and Entertainment Festival, First place Documentary Award at La Crosse Video Festival, Certificate of Merit in the Religious and Ethics Category at Intercom/Chicago International Film Festival and First place Documentary Award at La Crosse Video Festival, among others. The series was also shown at a variety of video festivals, such as the Banff Mountain Film Festival, the Canadian International Film and Video Festival, the Parnu International Visual Anthropology Film Festival in Estonia, the XI International Women's Film Festival in Madrid, Spain, the 12th International Hamburg Short Film Festival in Germany, the Festival International de la creation Video et Cinematographique in Manosque, France, the Festival of Illinois Film and Video Artists in Chicago, and the Three Rivers Arts Festival. [6] Her last experimental ethnographic documentary, Amma, A Documentary of a Living Saint, is an extraordinarily powerful portrayal of Mata Amritanandamayi, a world-renown woman spiritual leader and global social activist.

Besides creating artwork, Barbara Sykes has had a notable presence in the Chicago new media scene. In the late 1970s she became involved with The Center for New Television (formerly The Chicago Editing Center) where she would host video workshops and screen her work. [7] [8] In 1981, Sykes curated Video: Chicago Style, which was exhibited at Global Village in New York City, and was additionally screened on Manhattan Cable. [1] This exhibition eventually grew into Video and Computer Art: Chicago Style, which she presented along with Sykes's Retrospective, her one-woman exhibition, throughout Japan, Australia, Spain and was the first woman video artist to present in China, 1988-1989. [1] [9]

Sykes was a tenured, Professor of Television at Columbia College Chicago from 1982 to 2005. [10] [11] [12] She taught experimental video production and advanced and intermediate level field productions and editing courses. While at Columbia College, she also served as video coordinator and as initiator and director of the visiting artist and lecturer series for the Department of Television, organizing lectures by industry professionals and artists such as Gene Youngblood, author of Expanded Cinema , Barbara London, curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Marlon Riggs, filmmaker and gay rights activist, and Rafael Franca, which occurred in conjunction with "Brazilian Video Art", the first ever exhibition of Brazilian experimental video work in Chicago. [13]

In 1996 and 1997, Sykes was a featured artist in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago's retrospective exhibition "Art in Chicago, 1945-1995" and included in the companion book produced for this show. In 2016 Sykes took part in Celebrating Women in New Media Arts, a panel symposium held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The symposium highlighted women who have paved the way in the male dominated field of new media. Joan Truckenbrod and Claudia Hart were among some of the participants who shared their experiences making technological artwork as women, and some of the challenges they faced. The symposium preceded and helped to promote the 2018 release of the book New Media Futures: The Rise of Women in the Digital Arts published by the University of Illinois Press. [14] New Media Futures captures the contributions of twenty-two trailblazing mid-western women creators that were integral to the development of the digital arts and at the forefront of social change, technical innovation and artistic inquiry. New Media Futures featured artists and contributors are Barbara Sykes, Ellen Sandor, Donna Cox, Janine Fron, Carolina Cruz-Niera, Tiffany Holmes, Maxine Brown, Brenda Laurel, Copper Giloth, Jane Veeder, Martyl Langsdorf, Annette Barbier, Joan Truckenbrod, Claudia Hart, Margaret Dolinsky, Dana Plepys, Colleen Bushell, Nan Goggin, Mary Rasmussen, Sally Rosenthal, Lucy Petrovic and Abina Manning. Sykes and the other women in New Media Futures have participated in its book tours and HerStory presentations.

In 2018, Sykes' work By The Crimson Bands of Cyttorak was included in the Chicago New Media 1973-1992 exhibition curated by jonCates. [15]

List of Selected Works
TitleYear
The Poem1975
EVE I1975
Circle 9 Sunrise [16] 1976
A Movement Within1976
EVE II1976
Electronic Masks [17] 1978
By The Crimson Bands of Cyttorak [18] 1978
Duals1978
EVE III1978
Emanations [19] 1979
Waking [20] 1979
I Dream of Dreaming [21] 1980
Sketching a Motion1981
Witness [22] 1982
Kalyian [23] 1986
d/stabilize/d [24] 1987
Shiva Darsan [25] 1994
Song of the River [26] 1997
Amma: A Documentary of a Living Saint [27] 2007

See also

Related Research Articles

Laurie Spiegel is an American composer. She has worked at Bell Laboratories, in computer graphics, and is known primarily for her electronic music compositions and her algorithmic composition software Music Mouse. She is also a guitarist and lutenist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VJing</span> Broad designation for realtime visual performance

VJing is a broad designation for realtime visual performance. Characteristics of VJing are the creation or manipulation of imagery in realtime through technological mediation and for an audience, in synchronization to music. VJing often takes place at events such as concerts, nightclubs, music festivals and sometimes in combination with other performative arts. This results in a live multimedia performance that can include music, actors and dancers. The term VJing became popular in its association with MTV's Video Jockey but its origins date back to the New York club scene of the 1970s. In both situations VJing is the manipulation or selection of visuals, the same way DJing is a selection and manipulation of audio.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel J. Sandin</span> American artist and researcher

Daniel J. Sandin is an American video and computer graphics artist, designer and researcher. He is a Professor Emeritus of the School of Art & Design at University of Illinois at Chicago, and co-director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is an internationally recognized pioneer in computer graphics, electronic art and visualization.

Thomas Albert "Tom" DeFanti is an American computer graphics researcher and pioneer. His work has ranged from early computer animation, to scientific visualization, virtual reality, and grid computing. He is a distinguished professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a research scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).

The Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) is an interdisciplinary research lab and graduate studies program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, bringing together faculty, students and staff primarily from the Art and Computer Science departments of UIC. The primary areas of research are in computer graphics, visualization, virtual and augmented reality, advanced networking, and media art. Graduates of EVL either earn a Masters or Doctoral degree in Computer Science.

Phil Morton (1945–2003) was an influential American video artist and activist who founded the Video Area in 1970 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he taught for many years.

Kathy Smith is an Australian independent animator, painter, new media artist, and Professor with the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Smith chaired the John C. Hench Division of Animation & Digital Arts from 2004 - 2009 & 2010 - 2014.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Video Data Bank</span> Video art distributor in Chicago, founded 1976

Video Data Bank (VDB) is an international video art distribution organization and resource in the United States for videos by and about contemporary artists. Located in Chicago, Illinois, VDB was founded at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement.

Larry Cuba is a computer-animation artist who became active in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Julie Andreyev is a Vancouver-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores themes of animal agency and consciousness. Her ongoing Animal Lover work explores nonhuman animal agency and creativity through modes of interspecies collaboration and aleatoric methods. The Animal Lover projects seek to contribute towards an ethic of compassion and regard for the intrinsic worth of other-than-human individuals. She was born in Burnaby, British Columbia.

Jane Veeder is an American digital artist, filmmaker and educator. She is a professor at San Francisco State University in the Department of Design and Industry, at which she held the position of chair between 2012 and 2015. Veeder is best known for her pioneering work in early computer graphics, however she has also worked extensively with traditional art forms such as painting, ceramics, theatre, and photography.

Annette Louise Barbier was an American artist and educator. She worked with video art, net art, installation art, interactive performance, and emerging and experimental technologies since the 1970s. Themes in her work address "issues of home, defined locally as domesticity and more broadly as the ways in which we relate to our environment." An early work, "Home Invasion [1995]," incorporating critical dialogue and audio, is accessible from Leonardo. "Domestic space—formerly inviolable—is increasingly disrupted by electronic communication of all sorts, including radio, TV, email and the telephone." She was Chicago-based.

Kathy Rae Huffman is an American curator, writer, producer, researcher, lecturer and expert for video and media art. Since the early 1980s, Huffman is said to have helped establish video and new media art, online and interactive art, installation and performance art in the visual arts world. She has curated, written about, and coordinated events for numerous international art institutes, consulted and juried for festivals and alternative arts organisations. Huffman not only introduced video and digital computer art to museum exhibitions, she also pioneered tirelessly to bring television channels and video artists together, in order to show video artworks on TV. From the early 1990s until 2014, Huffman was based in Europe, and embraced early net art and interactive online environments, a curatorial practice that continues. In 1997, she co-founded the Faces mailing list and online community for women working with art, gender and technology. Till today, Huffman is working in the US, in Canada and in Europe.

Muriel Magenta née Zimmerman is an American visual artist working in new media genres of computer art, installation, multimedia performance as well as video and sculpture. Magenta is Professor of Art at Arizona State University.

Copper Giloth is a new media artist based in Amherst, Massachusetts. Giloth's work involves digital media, mobile art, virtual environments, animations, videos, painting, and installations, and have been influenced by elements of her life such as her parents. She, along with Darcy Gerbarg, helped organize art exhibitions that showed alongside the SIGGRAPH conference, marking the exhibitions as the first to be shown at the conference. Giloth has been described as "one of the leading exponents of computer art".

Bob Snyder is an American composer, sound and video artist, who lives and works in Chicago. His work focuses on the formal relations between electronic sounds and images, using synthesized visual and audio signals as his main medium. Throughout his career he has worked extensively with Sandin Image Processor, and his work has been featured in two Whitney Biennal exhibitions as well as institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the New York Public library and the Art Institute of Chicago. Several of his works have been made in collaboration with the artists Phil Morton, Tom DeFanti and Dan Sandin. Snyder is also the founder of the sound department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in its present form, where he was Professor Emeritus from 2016(?) until his retirement in 2022 after forty-six years at SAIC. He is the author of the book Music and Memory published by the MIT Press . He is also the author of the "Memory for Music" chapter in the 2009 and 2016 editions of the Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology. In 2020, Snyder contributed a chapter entitled “Repetitions and Silences: A Music and Memory Supplement” to the anthology Composition, Cognition, and Pedagogy, published by the Brazilian Association of Cognition and Musical Arts. (ABCM).

Colette Stuebe Bangert is an American artist and new media artist who has created both computer-generated and traditional artworks. Her computer-generated artworks are the product of a decades-long collaboration with her husband, Charles Jeffries "Jeff" Bangert (1938–2019), a mathematician and computer graphics programmer. Bangert's work in traditional media includes painting, drawing, watercolor and textiles.

Deanna Morse is an independent American experimental filmmaker and media artist. Her work is included in collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Women's Interart Center</span>

The Women's Interart Center was a New York City-based multidisciplinary arts organization conceived as an artists' collective in 1969 and formally delineated in 1970 under the auspices of Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) and Feminists in the Arts. In 1971, it found a permanent home on Manhattan's far West Side.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">JoAnn Gillerman</span> American new media artist

JoAnn Gillerman is an American multimedia artist and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is known for interdisciplinary, often interactive and immersive, works merging art, science, culture and technology. Gillerman emerged in the 1970s as an early new media artist, creating experimental combinations of video, collaborative live performance and installation. Art historian Liz Kotz wrote, "Gillerman pioneered the use of computer graphics and synthetically-generated imagery in video art … us[ing] the technology of computer-generated and re-processed images combined with electronic and acoustic music to develop different ways of making abstract visual designs." Since the 1990s, she has employed new technologies to produce interactive and educational environments, performances and works focused on cosmic events, natural phenomena and sociopolitical issues.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Cox, Donna J.; Sandor, Ellen; Fron, Janine (2018). New Media Futures: The Rise of Women in the Digital Arts. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. p. 160. ISBN   978-0-252-04154-9.
  2. ↑ "Dan Sandin | Video Data Bank". www.vdb.org. Retrieved 2018-03-14.
  3. ↑ "COPY-IT-RIGHT - jonCates (2009)". Issuu. 11 October 2013. Retrieved 2020-04-28.
  4. 1 2 Golemis, Dean P. (December 15, 1986). "Instructor Achieves Acclaim". Columbia Chronicle. Retrieved 10 March 2019.
  5. 1 2 Warren, Lynn (1996). Art in Chicago, 1945-1995. Thames and Hudson. ISBN   9780500237281.
  6. 1 2 3 4 "Barbara Sykes". www.hi-beam.net. Retrieved 2018-03-09.
  7. ↑ "The Chicago Editing Center Newsletter (September - October 1981)" (PDF). mediaburn.org. Retrieved 18 March 2019.
  8. ↑ Warren, Lynne (1984). Alternative Spaces: A History in Chicago. Chicago, IL: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. pp. 35–36. ISBN   0-933856-18-0.
  9. ↑ "The Third Australian Video Festival Program" (PDF). Retrieved 18 March 2019.
  10. ↑ Morris, Ed. "An Oral History Of Columbia College Chicago". An Oral History of Columbia College Chicago: 7.
  11. ↑ Guasco, Richard (1 April 1985). "Ace entries offer variety". Columbia Chronicle. Retrieved 10 March 2019.
  12. ↑ An Oral History Of Columbia College Chicago, Michael. "Neiderman" (PDF). An Oral History of Columbia College Chicago.
  13. ↑ "Brazilian Video Art To Be Shown". Chicago Tribune. April 8, 1988. Retrieved 2 March 2019.
  14. ↑ "Celebrating Women in New Media Arts". saic.edu. Retrieved 10 March 2019.
  15. ↑ Cates, Jon (2018). Chicago New Media, 1973-1992. Illinois: University of Illinois Press. p. 9. ISBN   978-0-252-08407-2.
  16. ↑ "Electronic Arts Intermix Video Collection List (as of Spring 1988)" (PDF).
  17. ↑ "Electronic Masks". YouTube . 17 December 2007.
  18. ↑ "By The Crimson Bands of Cyttorak". 13 January 2012.
  19. ↑ "Electronic Arts Intermix Video Collection List (as of Spring 1988)" (PDF).
  20. ↑ "Waking". ACM SIGGRAPH. Retrieved 2 March 2019.
  21. ↑ "I Dream of Dreaming". ACM SIGGRAPH. Retrieved 2 March 2019.
  22. ↑ "Witness". ACM SIGGRAPH. Retrieved 2 March 2019.
  23. ↑ "Kalyian".
  24. ↑ "d/stabilize/d - Media Burn Archive". Media Burn Archive. Retrieved 2018-03-14.
  25. ↑ "Shiva Darson".
  26. ↑ "A Song of the River".
  27. ↑ "A Documentary of a Living Saint".
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.