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Daniel J. Sandin (born 1942) 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. [1] He is an internationally recognized pioneer in computer graphics, electronic art and visualization. [2]
Dan Sandin received his B.A. in Natural Sciences from Shimer College in 1964 and his M.S. in Physics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1967. [3] He became interested in video in 1967, while helping to organize student demonstrations at the University of Illinois.[ citation needed ] In 1969, he joined as a teacher at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), in order to bring technology into the arts program. [4] This was shortly after his presentation of "Glowflow", a computer controlled light and sound system, created with Myron Krueger, Jerry Erdman, and Richard Venezky.[ citation needed ] By 1972, Thomas A. DeFanti joined UIC and together with Sandin they founded the Circle Graphics Habitat, now known as the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL). [4]
In 2018 Sandin's work, the Sandin Image Processor and the Sayre Glove, was included in the Chicago New Media 1973-1992 exhibition, curated by jonCates. [5] He also gave a demonstration of Particle Dreams in Spherical Harmonics in the CAVE 2 system, and was part of the symposium both of which were connected to the exhibition as a series of events. [6]
His major achievements were working on a series of projects including: Glowflow (1969), Sandin Image Processor (IP) (1971–1973), Sayre Glove (1977), PHSColograms (1988), CAVE (1992) and ImmersaDesk and Infinity Wall.
Dan Sandin received several awards including: the Guggenheim Fellowships awarded for video and sound in 1978, [7] the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for video art (with Stevenson Palfi) in 1981, [8] the Rockefeller Foundation's Video Fellowship in 1981, the Inventor of the Year award from the University of Illinois in 2000, and the Rockefeller Foundation's Film, Video and Multimedia Fellowship in 2002 for "Looking for Water 2," a virtual-reality, 3-D installation. [9]
Dan Sandin has said that his career has three main objectives: [10]
From 1971 to 1973, he designed the Sandin Image Processor, a patch programmable analog computer for real-time manipulation of video inputs through the control of the grey level information. His friend and neighbor Phil Morton helped with the early schematic plans diagram which they shared in a manual called the Distribution Religion. [11] Sandin demoed his Image Processor in a recorded live video “5 Minute Romp Through the IP” (1973). [12] This modular design was based on the Moog synthesizer. With Tom DeFanti, he would combine it with real-time computer graphics and synthesized music and perform visual concerts. He has performed worldwide and has received grants in support of his work from the Rockefeller Foundation (1981), the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (1980) and the Guggenheim Foundation (1978). His piece "Spiral PTL" was one of the first pieces included in the Museum of Modern Art's video art collection.[ citation needed ]
In 1977, with Tom DeFanti and Rich Sayre, he designed the Sayre Glove, the first data glove, as part of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. This device used light based sensors with flexible tubes with a light source at one end and a photocell at the other. As the fingers were bent, the amount of light that hit the photocells varied, thus providing a measure of finger flexion. It was mainly used to manipulate sliders, but was lightweight and inexpensive.[ citation needed ]
By 1988, Sandin was working on a type of digital photography called PHSColograms; a system whereby a number of still images were situated in an autostereoscopic manner and back-projected with light. The effect was very similar to holograms and many times viewers would mistake them as such. The initial system supported roughly 13 images but further improvements now could easily allow 100 such images to be used. This system was designed primarily for use in the medical field where these quasi-3D images could benefit surgeons.[ citation needed ]
The first CAVE was invented by Carolina Cruz-Neira, Daniel J. Sandin, and Thomas A. DeFanti in 1992. [13] This is an immersive system that became the standard for rear projection-based virtual reality systems. The normal full system consists of projections screens along the front, side and floor axes, and a tracking system for the "user". Although they used the recursive acronym Cave Automatic Virtual Environment for the CAVE system, the name also refers to Plato's "Republic" and "The Allegory of the Cave" where he explored the concepts of reality and human perception.
Since then there have been a couple offshoots of the CAVE technology, including ImmersaDesk, Infinity Wall and Oblong Industries' G-speak system. The ImmersaDesk is a semi-immersive system, resembling a drafting table, while the Infinity Wall is designed to cater to an entire room of people, such as a conference room. Extending this concept, G-speak supports gestural input from multiple-users and multiple-devices on and expandable array of monitors.
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Year | Title | Genre | Role | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|
1973 | "5 Minute Romp through the Image Processor" | with Phil Morton [11] | ||
1975 | "Wandawega Waters" | Experimental film with computer graphics | An experimental piece using computer processed video to give the surroundings of Lake Wandawega an other-worldly appearance. [14] | |
1974 | "Poop for the NCC" | with Thomas A. DeFanti | ||
1974 | "Triangle in Front of Square in Front of Circle in Front of Triangle" | |||
1979 | "Christmas Morning in Sister Bay" | Flm with computer graphics | Producer | experimental video featuring sounds of waves and church bells playing Christmas carols, while computer processed video pans across the beach of Sister Bay. [15] |
1980 | "Spiral PTL" | Experimental film with computer graphics | Video synthesis | "Probably The Last" with Thomas A. DeFanti (computer graphics) and Mimi Shevitz (audio synthesis), in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. [16] Short film features a computer processed image of a spiral transforming shape/form, set to new age music. [17] |
1980 | "Spiral for A.C.M." | Computer animation creates different spirals and effects. [14] | ||
1990 | "A Volume of Two-Dimensional Julia Sets" | |||
1995 | "The Kinetic Sculpture Garden" | |||
1996 | "The Oort Continuum" | VR application for the CAVE | The developers of the app include Alan Cruz, Alan Millman, Daniel J. Sandin, Deb Lowman, Ka-Leung Jark, Marcus Thiebaux, Margaret Dolinsky, Milana Huang, Tom Coffin, Margaret Watson, Joe Insley, Bor Tyng Lin, Robert Grzeszczuk, Lou Kauffman, Gary Minnix. [18] Featured in ACM Siggraph 1996 festival, Ars Electronica Center, and Total Museum Conference. [18] | |
1997 | "Poverty Island With Video Skies" | An integration of video images into a virtual environment. Featured in ACM Siggraph 1998 festival. [19] | ||
1999 | "From Death's Door to the Garden Peninsula" | |||
2001 | "EVL: Alive on the Grid" |
GRASS is a programming language created to script 2D vector graphics animations. GRASS was similar to BASIC in syntax, but added numerous instructions for specifying 2D object animation, including scaling, translation and rotation over time. These functions were directly supported by the Vector General 3D graphics terminal GRASS was written for. It quickly became a hit with the artistic community who were experimenting with the new medium of computer graphics, and is most famous for its use by Larry Cuba to create the original "attacking the Death Star will not be easy" animation in Star Wars (1977).
Visualization or visualisation is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Visualization through visual imagery has been an effective way to communicate both abstract and concrete ideas since the dawn of humanity. from history include cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek geometry, and Leonardo da Vinci's revolutionary methods of technical drawing for engineering and scientific purposes.
A cave automatic virtual environment is an immersive virtual reality environment where projectors are directed to between three and six of the walls of a room-sized cube. The name is also a reference to the allegory of the Cave in Plato's Republic in which a philosopher contemplates perception, reality, and illusion.
The Sandin Image Processor is a video synthesizer, usually introduced as invented by Dan Sandin and designed between 1971 and 1974. Some called it the "video equivalent of a Moog audio synthesizer." It accepted basic video signals and mixed and modified them in a fashion similar to what a Moog synthesizer did with audio. An analog, Modular Synthesizer, real time, video processing instrument, it provided video processing performance and produced subtle and delicate video effects of a complexity not seen again until well into the digital video revolution.
A video synthesizer is a device that electronically creates a video signal. A video synthesizer is able to generate a variety of visual material without camera input through the use of internal video pattern generators. It can also accept and "clean up and enhance" or "distort" live television camera imagery. The synthesizer creates a wide range of imagery through purely electronic manipulations. This imagery is visible within the output video signal when this signal is displayed. The output video signal can be viewed on a wide range of conventional video equipment, such as TV monitors, theater video projectors, computer displays, etc.
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.
PHSCologram is a registered trademark for barrier-strip and lenticular autostereograms made by Chicago-based art collective (Art)n laboratory.
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.
Bruce Howard McCormick (1928–2007) was an American computer scientist, Emeritus Professor at the Department of Computer Science, and founding director of the Brain Networks Lab at Texas A&M University.
Maxine D. Brown is an American computer scientist and retired director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Along with Tom DeFanti and Bruce McCormick, she co-edited the 1987 NSF report, Visualization in Scientific Computing, which defined the field of scientific visualization.
Larry Cuba is a computer-animation artist who became active in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Carolina Cruz-Neira is a Spanish-Venezuelan-American computer engineer, researcher, designer, educator, and a pioneer of virtual reality (VR). She is known for inventing the cave automatic virtual environment (CAVE). She previously worked at Iowa State University (ISU), University of Louisiana at Lafayette, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and she is currently an Agere Chair Professor at University of Central Florida (UCF).
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Ellen R. Sandor is an American new media artist. She is also founder of the Chicago-based (art)n, a collective of artists, scientists, mathematicians, and computer experts. Ellen Sandor and (art)n create sculptures that contain computer-generated photographic images that appear to be three dimensional. She is best known for combining computer graphics, sculpture, and photography to visualize subject matter that includes architecture, historical events, and scientific phenomena such as the AIDS virus, Neutrinos, Microglia, and CRISPR.
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.
Franz Fischnaller is a new media artist and transdisciplinary researcher. He is recognized for the creation of his digital, virtual reality and interactive art installations works across the fields of art, technology, humanities and cultural heritage.
Barbara Sykes 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. 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 , Museum of the Art Institute (Chicago), The Metropolitan Museum of Art 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.
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).
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