New Media Futures

The Rise of Women in the Digital Arts

Donna Cox, Ellen Sandor, Janine Fron, Donna Cox, Ellen Sandor, Janine Fron

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780252087011
  9780252041549
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252050183
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Trailblazing women working in digital arts media and education established the Midwest as an international center for the artistic and digital revolution in the 1980s and beyond. Foundational events at the University of Illinois and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago created an authentic, community-driven atmosphere of creative expression, innovation, and interdisciplinary collaboration that crossed gender lines and introduced artistically informed approaches to advanced research. Interweaving historical research with interviews and full-color illustrations, New Media Futures captures the spirit and contributions of twenty-two women working within emergent media as diverse as digital games, virtual reality, medicine, supercomputing visualization, and browser-based art. The editors and contributors give voice as creators integral to the development of these new media and place their works at the forefront of social change and artistic inquiry. What emerges is the dramatic story of how these Midwestern explorations in the digital arts produced a web of fascinating relationships. These fruitful collaborations helped usher in the digital age that propelled social media. Contributors: Carolina Cruz-Niera, Colleen Bushell, Nan Goggin, Mary Rasmussen, Dana Plepys, Maxine Brown, Martyl Langsdorf, Joan Truckenbrod, Barbara Sykes, Abina Manning, Annette Barbier, Margaret Dolinsky, Tiffany Holmes, Claudia Hart, Brenda Laurel, Copper Giloth, Jane Veeder, Sally Rosenthal, Lucy Petrovic, Donna J. Cox, Ellen Sandor, and Janine Fron.
 

PART 1

RENAISSANCE TEAMS: ART AND SCIENCE COLLABORATIONS

Though interdisciplinary coalitions are central to the first selection of interviews, women’s motivations differ and complement each other. The title “Renaissance Teams” captures the spirit of these collaborative endeavors among artists, technologists, and scientists working together toward a common goal.1 Part 1 opens with Ellen Sandor and Donna J. Cox, who have made collaborative means primary to their “artist as producer” modus operandi. Drawing from the roles of filmmaking producers, they not only contribute aesthetic guidance within a team setting, they also help to organize, direct, and operate within highly shifting and dynamic environments. Both women actively assemble teams, sometimes with international contributors, while realizing final artworks or visual products within collaboratory settings. Colleen Bushell’s orientation is more focused and directed as a visual designer who helps to advance innovation. With Marc Andreessen, she helped invent a visual design for the first visual browser, Mosaic, a transformative technology that had global impact. In contrast, Nan Goggin, who pioneered ad319 and early web art experiments, describes how collaborations naturally formed out of mutual academic goals and needs. Maxine Brown and Dana Plepys operate within a highly interdisciplinary academic environment and connect large communities of practice. On the other hand, Mary Rasmussen preferred the social benefits of working with small collaborative teams. Carolina Cruz-Neira was motivated by the necessity to solve complex virtual reality problems. She forged new entrepreneurial partnerships in commercial as well as academic endeavors. Finally, the late Martyl closes the chapter with her last oral history interview and provides a personal glimpse of the end of World War II, emerging feminist art, and attitudes that marginalized women in the history of art. She collaborated out of a sense of duty to bring together early artists and scientists in a critical time to create the Doomsday Clock, which ushered in the modern era of social responsibility during the nuclear age.

Note

1. Donna J. Cox, “Using the Supercomputer to Visualize Higher Dimensions: An Artist’s Contribution to Scientific Visualization,” Leonardo: International Journal of Art, Sciences and Technology 21 (1988): 233–42.

Ellen Sandor

Ellen Sandor is a New Media artist and founder/director of the collaborative artists’ group (art)n. She believes in the transformative role of artist as producer and director. In 1975, Sandor received an MFA in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Her time at SAIC led her to be inspired by photography, sculpture, and video, and intrigued by the spiritual nature of Outsider art. In the early 1980s, Sandor had the vision to integrate these things with other art forms, including computer graphics, which resulted in a new medium she called PHSColograms—the photography of virtual reality (VR) and computer graphics that can be viewed reflectively or backlit as multidimensional photographs and sculptural installations.

Because PHSColograms are a collaborative endeavor, Sandor has had the good fortune to work with an incredible group of gifted artists, scientists, technologists, and thinkers. These collaborators hail from distinguished institutions and universities, including the Scripps Research Institute; NASA Ames, Langley, and Lewis Research Centers; Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois; and SAIC. Some acclaimed artists that Ellen and (art)n have worked with include Ed Paschke, Karl Wirsum, Roger Brown, Mr. Imagination, Robert Losutter, Christopher Landreth, Martyl, Claudia Hart, and Carla Gannis. All these collaborators have shared her enthusiasm for utilizing technology to push conceptual and technical boundaries within the arts.

Her works of (art)n are in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, International Center of Photography, the University of Oklahoma, the Smithsonian Institution, and others. Commissions include those from the City of Chicago Public Art Program, the State of Illinois Art-in-Architecture Program, and SmithBucklin Corporation.

Sandor coauthored US and international patents awarded to her for the PHSCologram process. She also coauthored papers that have been published in Computers and Graphics, IEEE, and SPIE. She is an affiliate of eDream and a visiting scholar of culture and society, NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is chair of the advisory board of SAIC’s Gene Siskel Film Center. She is on the board of governors for SAIC, life trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago, and secretary of the board of directors, Eyebeam, New York. In 2012, she received the Thomas R. Leavens Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts through Lawyers for the Creative Arts. In 2013, she received the Gene Siskel Film Center Outstanding Leadership Award, and in 2014, SAIC awarded her an honorary doctorate of fine arts. In 2016, she was honored as Fermilab’s artist in residence. In 2017, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists honored her for her longstanding commitment to integrating art and science. She is cofounder of the Richard and Ellen Sandor Family Collection.

Collaborating was always easy for me. I find being both a team member and a team leader to be very natural. I absolutely love it. I have always been a collaborator. I’ve never been the type of person to sit alone in a room and paint. I love working with exciting, creative people and getting to play in worlds that are completely new and different to me. I’ve worked with traditional artists, video artists, filmmakers, animators, mathematicians, scientists, and historians. I learn something amazing from each new group I work with. It’s hard work but rewarding.

As a collaborator you can’t let your team down—even if it’s a first-time experiment. I believe in delivering. I believe in finishing. You just don’t fail and walk away. If a piece doesn’t work, you keep going until it works. I’ve often had to work at a fast pace, which I thoroughly enjoy. I also had to learn to keep remaking my teams. I’m relentless. I won’t let it go. It’s been an interesting odyssey and I feel blessed.

In 1966 my husband, Richard, and I moved to Berkeley, California, which was a happening place. I got to meet some intriguing, exciting women, and together we founded the Berkeley chapter of the National Organization for Women. Hanging out with these pioneers helped me build my confidence for future endeavors. It was a lot of fun but we didn’t realize the full extent of what was going to happen. Most of us knew that our daughters and our granddaughters would benefit from our efforts and that sons and grandsons would benefit too because there could be more equal partnerships. I just didn’t realize what a revolution it would cause. The same could be said of the digital/scientific revolution.

In 1972 we moved to Chicago, which is one of the greatest cities in the world. The Midwest has a heart and soul and this was where I wanted to raise my children. It’s where new beginnings are looked upon with joy. Artists can show their work on either coast but in Chicago they can truly innovate. It’s a fantastic place to both make art and see it everywhere. It can be found in museums, labs, galleries, studios, film centers, theaters—even in many transcendent restaurants where the art is edible.

That year, my dream of being able to go back to graduate school came true. It was the beginning of a journey where I learned that working solo was not part of my dream. Next to my working space at SAIC was the first Video Data Bank where I found inspiration. I intuitively realized it was part of the beginning of New Media and this was part of my dream. I graduated with an MFA in sculpture in 1975 and started doing neon installations. I collaborated with Ace Neon and Sons to complete commissions I received from private collectors. It was the beginning of my early New Media work producing neon pieces based on Picasso’s erotic drawings, later blending photographic personal statements with neon. The controversial content of the work did not stop me, and fearlessness had officially begun.

California, 1966–1972, 80" × 28" × 18" mixed media sculpture by Ellen Sandor comprised of wood, hardware cloth, Portland cement and coloring, broken china and glass, polyester resin, found objects, photographs, cloth, and paper Day-Glo; Sandor pictured with her wearable artwork submissions for her SAIC graduate studies in sculpture. Courtesy of Ellen Sandor.

In 1981 I received a commission from a private New York collector to do a large 3D postcard about the financial markets. Of course, I had no idea how I was going to do this. I hired artists Greg Gundlach and Grayson Marshall to work on this commission with me. We used barrier screens, Cibachrome film, and dioramas using metaphors about capitalism in the United States. The same scene was photographed nine times with forty-five minutes for each exposure, moving it slightly along a horizontal track—it was all analog, a real garage-art process.

A Tribute to Modigliani, 1978 neon sculpture installation with detail. Commissions included The Money House, 1976, for Citizens Savings and Loan Association, San Francisco, California; and the Fiorucci boutique in Water Tower Place, Chicago, Illinois. Courtesy of Ellen Sandor.

Then in 1982 I was compelled to rebuild the garage-art camera with the help of Jerry August. I put together a small team of artists (“it takes a village”) that I called (art)n Laboratory, (pronounced Art to the Nth). From conversations with Michael and Peggy Spencer, we came up with the name PHSCologram for photography, holography, sculpture, and computer graphics. I worked with really wonderful artists I knew from SAIC, like the late, fabulous sculptor Randy Johnson, the amazing video artist Mark Resch, the exquisite fashion photographer Gina Uhlmann, and my mentor and extraordinary artist, Professor Jim Zanzi. We collaborated with the exceptional Gary Justis, who is a fantastic sculptor. We also worked with the holographers Steve Smith and Tom Sketkovich. The challenge of this installation was not only technical but also artistic. Even though it was analog, I needed people with specific skills who could thrive on my leadership style, “getting it done.” I sincerely loved my creative and high-energy team, and with them PHSCologram ’83 was created [see p. 26].

For (art)n’s first installation, we built huge sculptures around large PHSCologram panels.1 They were tributes to Outsider artists Georgia O’Keeffe [see p. 5], Louise Nevelson, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp. When Tom DeFanti and Dan Sandin, codirectors of EVL, Phil Morton, chair of video at SAIC, and others from the digital world saw it, they recognized that this was an immersive environment (a precursor to VR). At the time, I thought I was just making exciting sculpture, but they realized this was something that could one day become a digital, immersive environment. In November 1983, we showed PHSCologram ’83 on Wacker Drive, and Michel Ségard, one of the art critics from the New Art Examiner, said, “This is one of the ways the future is going to go.” He wrote an extensive article called “Artists Team Up for the Future” for the New Art Examiner.2 The PHSCologram years had officially begun.

In 1985, I had a gut instinct that the world was going digital, so I wanted to collaborate with some of the gurus of that world. I worked with the great pioneering artist Dan Sandin [see p. 20] and engineer extraordinaire Tom DeFanti at the Electr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Lisa Wainwright
• Foreword by Anne Balsamo
• Foreword by Judy Malloy
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1. Renaissance Teams: Art and Science Collaborations
• Part 2. The Aesthetics of New Media Expression
• Part 3. Migratory Influences and Inspirations
• Closing Reflections
• Appendix: Original List of Guiding Interview Questions
• Glossary
• References
• Index