Excerpts from (art)n : Re-Imaging the Future
Ray Kurzweil, prolific inventor, author and futurist prophesized that Virtual Reality would navigate the 21st Century, forever changing the way people interact with each other and evolve as “spiritual machines.” For the past three decades, internationally noted multimedia artist, Ellen Sandor, has creatively challenged and inspired the public to consider the implications and possibilities that the future may hold within the virtual world Kurzweil envisioned.
Under Sandor’s direction, a diverse portfolio comprised of commissioned sculptures, installations and singular pieces were created in collaboration with her Chicago-based collective, (art)n, and an interdisciplinary mix of International artists, scientists and thinkers. (art)n’s work addresses subjects that place the most current issues of science, art, history, and technology into the public arena for social discourse and debate, recording an elegant portrait of the digital landscape for future generations. Common themes throughout (art)n’s oeuvre include the exploration of outer space, the natural environment, and the human body, combined with examination of various forms of human expression ranging in scope from the horrors of war and terrorism to the need for tolerance and creativity.
Realized as computer-generated images that are visible to the naked eye in three-dimensions, the group’s virtual photographic process, widely known as PHSColograms, have also been called the “daguerreotype of Virtual Reality.” Drawing on the process-oriented works of the Surrealists and Dadaists, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, (art)n has broken new ground with its conceptual blending of process and content. (art)n’s body of work resembles what Alfred Stieglitz once described his showings as a “laboratory of ideas,” and are visual evidence of C.P. Snow’s “third culture,” embodying a new way of seeing, thinking and creating a framework for the digital domain, in multiple dimensions across disciplinary cultures and timelines.
The art of our epoch will not only exist as singular objects authored by singular artists; it is evolving as a rich collection of ideas, produced with multiple media by multiple authors, and even in multiple locations at different moments in time. The greatest rewards in producing art under these conditions is creating a shared language for embedding meaning into the unknown outcome of each experimentation:
Successful collaborations inspire a communal spirit that enables a lively exchange of ideas. Every new project presents unique opportunities to take risks and experience encounters with how people relate to one another to construct creative environments that are receptive to common goals. The goals of a collaborative effort are not always fixed from the beginning of a project or the seed of an idea. The more diverse a particular team is, the greater room for discussion, improvisation, and innovative approaches that can give birth to revolutionary discoveries that influence how we document our times, delve into the future and celebrate the past.
The PHSCologram term, coined by Ellen Sandor in 1983, is an acronym for photography, holography, sculpture and computer graphics. The PHSCologram process begins in the computer, where models are created using a software application such as Alias Maya. The objects are sculpted as if working with digital clay, and textures are created and applied to the surfaces of these models. Once the scene is complete, it is then rendered to create a series of 64 separate images. The virtual camera pans across the scene, giving each image a slightly different perspective. After rendering, the 64 images are composited into one image using (art)n’s proprietary software. Through this process known as interleaving, columns from each image are rotated and recombined to form the final image. This image is then printed on transparent film and mounted to the reverse side of a piece of Plexiglas, with a barrier screen of alternating clear and black lines mounted to the front. Illuminated in a lightbox, each of the viewer’s eyes see a slightly different perspective and the brain interprets these multiple sequences into a single 3D virtual image.
