(.dS) danSandin.int
Dan Sandin of the Electronic Visualization Lab @ the University of Illinois
at Chicago (http://www.evl.uic.edu/)
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!DAN SANDIN!
since the late 1960's Dan Sandin has developed artware systems integrating
digitial and analog computers, customized circuits, home{brewed|built}-hardware,
video games + virtualReality.
Sandin, a professor @ the University of Illinois at Chicago, founded the
Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL), created the Sandin Image Processor
(I.P.), developed the CAVE virtual reality (VR) system + various other
[artware systems/technologies/projects/pieces]. Dan Sandin's Image Processor
(built from 1971 - 1973) offered artists unprecedented abilities to [create/control/affect/transform]
video + audio data, enabling live audio-video performances that literally
set the stage for current praxis. open sourcing the plans for the Image
Processor as an [artware/system/toolset] Dan Sandin + Phil Morton created
the Distribution Religion. as a predecessor to the open source movement,
this approach allowed artists to engage with these systems + continues
to [interest/inspire] [artisits/developers]. honoring the Distribution
Religion, the innovative hystory of the Image Processor + addressing the
vibrant potential of these systems criticalartware archived the Distribution
Religion, converted the documents to a single PDF file + now releases
these plans to the {critical|artware} community.
criticalartware interviews Dan Sandin, [discussing/illuminating] the community
+ development of the early moments of video art in Chicago, artware, performing
live audio-video, virtual reality, open source movements, righteous NTSC
outputs, the video revolution + the changes ++ similarities that [bridge/differentiate]
then && now. criticalartware freely offers this interview as {text|audio|video}
data to be downloaded via the interweb + exchanged as shared cultural
resources. (bensyverson, jon.satrom ++ jonCates)
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Dan Sandin
Electronic Visualization Lab
University of Illinois at Chicago
interviewed by criticalartware
2003.04.09
1969.BAK
Dan Sandin: So I've been asked to talk about the kind of history of the
analog image processor and how it began, but i want to kinda backup one
step and talk about an event i did in 1969 with Myron Krueger who wrote
Artificial Reality and Jerry Erdman. It was a computer controlled environment
where there were pressure pads in the floor that sensed the positions
of people, there was a PDP-12, which was a computer, a laboratory instrument
computer, designed to monitor and control laboratory instruments, hence
it had all this analog IO ([input/output]). That analog IO was used to
sense the positions of people and control light displays that were based
on phosphors which were charged up and sent around the room in tubes.
And also to control a Moog Model 2 synthesizer to control the sound environment.
EARLY VIDEO ART COMMUNITY
Dan Sandin: It's a little hard to say but certainly a number like 20 or
so would miss people. Now at the time, in the early 70s, there really
was a video revolution going on and alot of people doing video art and
video politics. Alot of that had to do with the realization that T.V.
was the dominant communication media of the time, and even more so today.
Having access to the means of production for a variety of goals was revolutionary.
There were video groups that were interested primarily in community organization
and political speech. There were other groups like the one here at the
UIC and the School of the Art Institute who were interested in personally
expressive art or personal transformation through technology, which was
really our idea of it. This was a nation wide community. Chicago was perhaps
uniquely technical in the sense that we were very interested in developing
these tools for the abstraction of video and doing nonstandard special
effects on them.
SHARING ++ ORGANIZING
Dan Sandin: We used to show up at this bar and play tapes. Each of the
organizations would organize several video events of various kinds per
year. You put 3 or 4 organizations together and that ends up a video event
a month to go to and see tapes and meet your friends. It was a very cooperative
group, a very sharing group. It kind of had to be because although the
equipment in a sense was personally affordable, it was like the cost of
automobile for an editing tape recording, and a portapak was like $1000.00.
I think back then Volkswagens cost $1200.00 or something like that. You
indeed could afford one of the instruments but if you wanted to have a
critical mass of instruments, sharing was the operative mechanism so you
could do the complete production process.
SANDIN IMAGE PROCESSOR
Dan Sandin: I had been working in this kind of technological art area,
so my visual background was in photography; my academic background was
in physics. I used to do lots of false color photography, photography
that was based on color processing techniques that produced false colors
and light modulators like bent pieces of plexiglass, like lightshow in
reverse. The same technology is used in lightshows of the same period.
It occurred to me, after my experience with the Moog Model 2, which is
a modular patch programmable analog sound synthesizer, it occurred to
me in a discussion i had with Ross Dobson, we were hanging around and
said 'What would it mean to do the equivalent of a Moog Model 2'?A little
bit of thinking made us realize that gains would be like fading in and
out, multiplication would be like keying and addition would be like mixing
sounds together is like superimposition. So that if one simply took a
Moog Model 2 and increased its bandwidth to handle video signals, you
would have a very significant processing instrument. Now at the time,
the video revolution hadn't happened yet, so i viewed this as largely
a still image processing instrument because i could take pictures with
my 35mm camera and i could scan them in a slide scanner effectively and
then process those images and then rephotograph the results. That was
the context for the original idea.
I left the University of Wisconsin and moved here to the University of
Illinois. This was 1969; i was hired to bring computers into the art curriculum
of the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1969. Of course there are
still people debating whether or not that should be done. After i got
here i got interested in video. Part of what interested me was a film
called "On/Off" which was called a video film in that it was
essentially photographed off of a T.V. screen where the T.V. was being
modified in various ways. That struck me. It was a very kinetic and wonderful
kind of experience. When the Rover 2 happened with video it occurred to
me i wouldn't have to do this in a T.V. studio or with stills. I could
do it with moving images. An individual or a small institution or a group
of people could actually own the tools of production, which wasn't the
case before. So then i decided to build the Image Processor as a realtime
video processing instrument.
The Moog Model 2 had the control signals were 0 to 10 volts and they were
separate form the audio signals which were more or less standard 1 volt
line levels. In the analog I.P. control signals and video signals were
intercompatible so that any T.V. signal could become a control signal.
I basically built the first version and Phil Morton, in fact had been
aware of this as i was building the first version, as it became done he
said i want to build a copy. I said you definitely have permission to
build a copy, but i actually don't know if you can build a copy. I didn't
want t be insulting, but i didnt really know what it took, because you're
so immersed in this stuff, in designing and building it, its hard to figure
out what resources are actually necessary to do a copy. We talked about
it a little bit and he built the first copy. As part of that process of
building the first copy we did a documentation that was sufficient so
that other people could copy it. It took a year's worth of Friday afternoons
where I'd show up at Phil's house and we'd work on his I.P. for awhile
and he'd produce part of the documentation and I'd work on it. We developed
a format and a way of doing it. I wont say it was intensive work every
Friday afternoon but it took a year of getting together and fiddling at
it. By the end of that we actually accomplished a document which enabled
a large number of people. In a period of a few years, 20 or so copies
of the I.P. were built. Almost all of them by individuals or small arts
institutions. Really not by electronic circuit nerds, in general, but
by people who wanted to have access to the power of the tools and were
willing to learn what they had to learn to do it. Part of the structure
was the first thing they did was to build their test instruments from
heath kits.
I arranged for a printed circuit card company to keep the masters and
people could order the printed circuit cards from them. What i sent out
was a list of all the components and where to get them. And you could
literally xerox these things and send them off to Newark and Allied and
get the components and then start building.
I literally had images of what i wanted to do with the I.P. I had these
things and they were based on educating myself in these photographic process
of optical processing stuff and in my own experience. I worked with a
company called Lighting Systems Design, LSD. And it had cards with the
letters LSD glowed in black light. And we did light shows and i did it
for several years. It was great. I really enjoyed it. There are these
kinds of lifestyle issues of being able to involve yourself in your art
at all sorts of levels. Tom and I did the first technical presentation
at the first Siggraph. It was called "Computer Graphics as a Way
of Life". We really meant it that way. We felt that these were tools
that could transform your life. You could use it in education. You could
use it in the expression of your art. You could use it in the creation
of tools. It was a technology that could effect an enormous range of activities.
And that's of course true.
We used to talk about doing the video was a personally transforming process
and the video tape was the exhaust. In a sense, I'm still interested in
doing that. So you have these visions and you have to extend the tools
to execute these visions. And so you do. You do and then the tools extended
themselves as only a step in the process. And then of course the process
of producing the next vision informs you about doing the tools. And so
the practitioner-toolmaker is an important aspect of the game versus a
specialist who makes tools and then a user community who has a relatively
peripheral influence on those tools. And one of the things that is really
wrong with the essentially computer community is that the development
of software primarily is for processes that can make alot of money. And
artists by and large have bought into the idea of using these tools. So
they are only using tools and modalities that were designed for an environment
to make lots of money. So the purpose of these tools and the way they're
structured are quite different. Not that you can't do interesting things
with them and there hasn't been great art made with them and stuff, but
from my own personal point of view that strikes me as like a serious problem.
The artists, in order to really be advanced, have to be technically competent
enough to be able to expand, subvert, change and create their own tools.
Of course, that is going on. I mean, that's not gone. There are still
a significant thread of that and a significant thread in Chicago here
that i see pop up every once in awhile. And the open source movement...
you go to art conferences that are kind of art cross tech conferences,
like Version>03 that i was just at in Chicago, and the artists and
the technologists have a continuing discussion about open source and ways
to kind of change that structure from the artists as consumers of stuff
that was meant for other purposes to artists as participants and creators
in the technological form itself.
LEARNING ++ BUILDING
Dan Sandin: At that time, everybody had to be their own video technician
because it wasn't specialized. All of the video community probably had
a deeper understanding of video than the modern video student does, partially
because of the necessity of it. So i would say the entire community was
technically savvy. As i mentioned, most of the people that built this
weren't really part of lets say the hobbyist electronics community. But
were really people who were interested in video and art and learned the
electronics or had friends who were crossovers in some sense and worked
together. So in some sense, it is very mush like the open source development
that we have today in software. I mean, i made these plans available and
for five bucks i would send somebody a copy and five bucks roughly covered
xeroxing and mailing costs. There were a bunch of new modules developed
by people at other sites. Dick Sipple in Cleveland did a wonderful job
of building their copy, physically put together much better than mine,
and also added several important modules. And there were a number of people
around the country that developed new modules and improvements on modules.
They would send me the plans in more or less the same format. And i would
kind of add it into the stack and send them out. I remember i sent out
something with the original thing saying that you know i suppose that
if somebody made alot of money with this i might want some of it back.
And then that didn't feel quite so comfortable. So later on i changed
it to i want a good video tape from every I.P. that gets copied. That
was even too much for people. Not so much that they were unwilling to
do it, but they took it to seriously! I just wanted a video tape from
them, but they thought it had to be a magnum opus. I even dropped that.
But the important part was it kind of propelled itself. I was not put
into managing a company or personally helping every I.P. builder. The
fact that people had already built I.P.s could help other people build
I.P.s kept me from immediately being put in a maintenance mode or a management
mode. So it was very successful.
I was in a unique position in that i was a professor. As far as i was
concerned, i was paid by the state to create and disseminate information
so i did. That was fine with me. I didn't feel i needed economic support
back. Other people did strategies like trying to start a company and try
and sell these things. Not so much with the motivation of making money,
although they would like to support themselves, not like the dot com or
anything, where they expected to get rich over it, but as a way to make
these things available to people. Bill Etra and Steve Rutt did the Rutt-Etra
Synthesizer, which was an analog synthesizer very similar to the I.P.
in it's electronic structure, although it was scan processor. It primarily
operated with the geometry of the image and my instrument was a video
signal processor, essentially a grey value or color processor and primarily
played with the grey value domain and not the geometry of the image. The
two together made great instruments. He decided the best way to distribute
was to make this company and sell these things. And so we had this ongoing
contest as to who would be the most successful at distributing stuff.
I won by i think 2 instruments or something like that. And he actually
worked alot harder at it than i did.
REALTIME FUNCTIONS
Dan Sandin: The idea of actually copying the instrument strikes me as
insane. I mean, its a 25, what was it... 1970s... 30 year old creature,
30 year old electronic design, so nobody should be copying that stuff.
There are enough pieces around so that museums should just take the original
ones and put them together.
There are a number of functioning I.P.s still out there and people are
still using them. What i would think you would do now is do it in software.
In other words you would take some of these high speed processing cards
that are associated with modern personal computers and program it. To
me, that would be the rational thing to do.
One of the things about the I.P. that makes it appealing is that modern
digital tools are really much clumsier than the I.P. was. Much less tactile.
Much less spatial. There you could do 3 or 4 things at once and on a modern
computer you would have to do 25 mouse actions to make 1 change. It's
absurd. The human interface in that kind of creature and the ability to
learn it like an instrument where it's physical distribution of space
allows you to do things before you... muscle memory does them before you
think of them. You just envision the conclusion and your hands do it.
Its like, that's what happens when you play a musical instrument and that
kind of relationship with the I.P. was indeed very possible. And there
were virtuosos, people who could do completely amazing things.
So the way you developed a piece was through a process of improvisation
and rehearsal. I used to make this joke that... there were always these
people talking about video art and i remember giving my tapes to some
curator and they left the door and i said "you know, that person
has seen less video art than Phil Morton rehearses for 1 piece."
and so it was very much that kind of process of producing. It was very
very rich in feedback and very rich in kind of self education. You would
just kinda put yourself into this instrument and mess around and you would
discover stuff and you would learn how to get back there and then you
would learn how to sequence those amazing places into some kind of structure.
Video editing was actually a substantial problem at the time and most
pieces that i did and Phil Morton did in an important sense were not edited.
They were, to a large extent, live performances maybe chunked together
in an edit of some sort. You couldn't... there was no way you could get
2 timebase correctors and 2 tape recorders into the same room. So mixing
was out of the question. Now cuts, that was possible. Mixing could be
done live with the I.P. but could not be done in post-production.
DIGITAL SYSTEMS
Dan Sandin: I'm not really very familiar with it. I mean, I've seen a
couple of video performances where people seem to be able to make these
things work. I am familiar with the kind of tools that are available in
post-production and they're of course the kind i described but then again
you are in a post-production phase. So that's not disabling, the fact
that you can get to the same place and exactly the same effect at exactly
time that you typed in has got real advantages. And doesn't require, in
a sense, the kind of musical... its more like composing than it is like
playing an instrument. There are real advantages to that kind of approach.
There are live performance instruments. I've seen a couple and they kind
of seem to work well. But, based on the email lists that i chat with about
this stuff, i think that they are not really at the state of evolution
that the analog stuff was in the seventies. And they would like to be.
And could be. I think it's certainly possible now to create an instrument
that is vastly more powerful and just as interactive and live as the analog
I.P. With digital tools. You just aren't going to do it by stringing a
bunch of tools together that were designed for other purposes. It would
have to be like a system level ground up design.
VIRTUAL REALITY
Dan Sandin: One of the things that's nice about VR, is that it doesn't
have a WIMP interface. "Windows, Mice and Pointers" for those
who haven't heard the term before. Not at all pejorative. I'm using more
and more video materials, video acquired materials, in my work because
the technology is able to be able handle those better and better. Essentially
displaying... to do what i want to do i have to display like 2000 by 500
texture maps at a 30 frames a second and that stretches the Onyx system.
However, Linux boxes can probably do it. Just haven't gotten the software
yet to work on them.
But at some point, i have some affection to go back and do it. I would
do a spatially oriented interface. I would use a bunch of musical instrument
style midi controls for it and assign functions and you know where they
are and you've got lots of knobs and buttons and keys and body sensors
and a whole range of input stuff that is very different than what was
designed to be the computer model of the office.
REALTIME HYSTORIES
Dan Sandin: One of the things that i think may not be clearly understood,
but you can see from 1 of those tapes, is that there is video and computer
graphics that Tom DeFanti and i put together very clearly in the early
70's. Tom DeFanti came in 1973 with an instrument called the GRASS system,
which stands for Graphic Symbiosis System. It was a realtime computer
graphics system based on calligraphic displays. These are displays that
instead of creating a raster in a T.V. format but with higher scan rates;
it actually drew things on a phosphor screen and then would redraw them
on a phosphor screen. Hence the term calligraphic. It was a realtime instrument.
You would draw it once and it would fade away. It was as easy to change
every frame, as it was to draw a frame. So it structurally was a realtime
medium. The device that did it, the equivalent of the graphics card, was
actually an analog computer, the Cadillac of its time. It was equally
as good as these Onyxes were 10 years ago. We would actually point the
TV camera towards these display screen and then perform on that instrument
in realtime, as a combination. So computer graphics and video had actually
been together thoroughly in my work for a long time.
The switch over from... there were a bunch of them. First of all there
were calligraphic displays and then they became technically too hard to
maintain and then the raster graphics came in as the model. But the raster
graphics has this problem of stopping computer kinetics, motion, computer
graphics and everything became computer animation because memories weren't
big enough and computers weren't fast enough to create any of this stuff
in realtime. Computer graphics stopped moving. I stopped being interested.
But there was one segment of the community where things still moved and
that was video games. Now there were little space roaches moving around
on the screen, not the whole screen, little pieces of the screen could
move around because computers were up to that. Tom and I worked with video
game manufacturers and essentially designed equipment for artists that
were based on the video game technology of the time. I designed these
computers to have righteous NTSC video output so that these could be recorded
and these were meant for cable TV markets or maybe small TV stations.
It was never a great economic success but it was, like the analog I.P.
it had a large community of very committed users that produced alot of
great work with these instruments.
Then in about 1987 or so, when the personal IRIS came out, the kind of
geometry engine machine that was designed to do realtime computer graphics
again, i remember looking at the screen and saying "Oh my god, this
stuff moves. I could be interested in this again." i started looking
at that in a serious way. I had diverted into animation and the video
game stuff and into a couple of other 3D mediums like PHSColograms and
stuff. Basically i was out of the motion graphics business because animation
was too much like work. But then this stuff moved so i started to focus
that energy. In 1990 basically i kinda decided that virtual reality was
really the interesting thing to do. And i went around and talked to the
various Virtual Reality inventors and creators. Then Tom and I sat around
deciding how to do it different. And we did. A few years later the CAVE
popped out which became one of the dominant forms of Virtual Reality.
NAMING.SYS
Dan Sandin: Coming to the name we had other things like Pocket Cathedral,
Interactive Mosque and Video Shrine. All these names were part of this
process... and the it kinda feels like a cave and all of that stuff...
Yggdrasil is the tree of life in Norse mythology. Everybody calls it "YG".
The creator Dave Pape thinks it should be called "ygg". He never
intended it to be an acronym, YG. It's supposed to be "Ygg".
But he did a system before that called XP so that it was very hard for
the community to switch over to "Ygg". That's entirely Dave's.
Dave was a graduate student here and YG, excuse me "Ygg", is
his thesis. There is a very significant community of people operating
with "Ygg" around the world. It is a scripting language. You
have to understand the idea of a scene graph and understand hierarchical
relationships. You can write your own nodes and extend the capabilities.
ARTWORLDS ++ ARTWARES
Dan Sandin: Distributing this technology before the art establishment
is ready to deal with it is a constant problem. Although now the art establishment
can deal with the kind of work we were doing in the 70's completely competently.
It really took them 20 or 30 years to figure out that it's relevant. It
certainly is the case that the stuff that i did 20 to 30 years ago is
shown in museums today much much more frequently than the work I've done
in the last decade. By the time the museums were ready to deal with it,
i was on to other things. In Europe and Japan there is a much better understanding
of media arts as central to art production in now the 21rst century. They
have real museums. The Ars Electronica center is a real live multi-floor
museum that was captured by some very visionary people. It was going to
be a modern art museum but it became a media oriented museum and it's
really out there. And there's a couple of others in Germany and there's
the ICC in Tokyo. These things have like permanent installations. They
have traveling shows. The United States has been particularly retrograde
and continues to be kind of backwards on this stuff. It just means that
the United States is going to lose it's preeminence in the artworld that
it has been able to maintain for the last number of years by having been
forward looking at the beginning of the century. And now it isn't.
But there are always opportunities. Siggraph was and is a continuing opportunity.
ISEA is a good opportunity. There are these episodic shows. And now LA
County Museum and a couple of other museums are doing a show a year in
this area. They tend to still play it pretty safe and are connecting up
with the older versions of this stuff. But there is progress on it. By
and large the artworld is irrelevant to these kinds of technologies I'm
talking about, to these kinds of communications. It has chosen to be irrelevant
and is staying irrelevant and is just no longer a significant player in
the game. It could be again but you look at things like video tape...
they really have not been able to deal with video tape. In the 70's most
of the Video Art was on video tape. What has survived is installations.
And that makes sense. The museum actually has a place there. It has a
physical place you can setup these things. People come in and look at
them. They are meant to kind of walk by and stare at as long as you want.
It kind of fits what the museum can do. You can imagine that museums have
things that are like the print room that have some of the museums, like
the Walker, have excellent archives of tapes. If there is a tape, they
own it, you want to see you can show up and look at it. And that's great.
And that's an important role. But of course, all of this stuff should
be on the web. People should be able to view it at various quality levels
and either pay for or not depending on what models you want to try distribution
on. So some of this stuff should be on this website that is next to me.
Maybe there is a picture of the I.P. over here maybe and I don't know,
maybe a picture of the GRASS machine here. Who knows...
Dan Sandin
interviewed by criticalartware coreDevelopers:
bensyverson, jon.satrom ++ jonCates
@ the Electronic Visualization Lab
@ the University of Illinois at Chicago
http://www.evl.uic.edu/
CHI IL .US
2003.04.09
video edit by criticalartware coreDevelopers:
bensyverson, jon.satrom ++ jonCates
http://www.criticalartware.net
this criticalartware interview is a shared cultural resource released
under
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike version 2.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/
/*
