Ellen Sandor & (art)n

A growing renaissance within the Chicago art scene was significantly catalyzed through video artists and SAIC alumni, including Barbara Sykes, Jane Veeder, Phil Morton, and Ellen Sandor. As early as 1982, Ellen Sandor created a unique, large-scale, three-dimensional backlit photographic mural, entitled Free Markets I.  A private collector commissioned this precursory virtual-reality-like artwork that had been created with a room-sized film camera in a garage-art studio. The immersive work combined photography and sculpture with the visual illusion of holography without lasers. From the success of this project, Sandor formed (art)n – an artists’ collaboratory in 1983 with SAIC peers and faculty.  She envisioned a new art form that blended aspects of photography, sculpture, and holography with computer graphics and coined the term PHSColo-gram (pronounced skol-o-gram). This complexity of media required collaboration across disciplines with artists, technologists, and thinkers who shared her enthusiasm.

The first exhibition of PHSCologram ’83 on Wacker Drive in Chicago featured tributes to famous women and men artists, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Louise Nevelson, and the Outsider, Intuitive, and Naïve artists. This public installation was an early example of a virtual reality environment assembled within an artistic context. It opened a dialog with others working to combine emerg-ing technologies with traditional art forms. The provocative installation caught the attention of the arts community and was reviewed on the front page of the New Art Examiner as a historic breakthrough for its original form, process, and approach. SAIC’s Morton and UIC’s Sandin and DeFanti were intrigued by Sandor’s efforts and developed a collaboration that would later inspire EVL’s research to create the virtual reality CAVE.

"The piece [PHSCologram '83] is jumpy, flashy, somewhat jumbled, and simultaneously visually oversaturated even as it is informationally fragmented, the way television news is. But this is part of the work's commentary on the texture of electronic communications, It is not necessary to like or agree with the immediate subject matter of such a piece, just as it is not necessary to like the singing in music videos. The message is not in the subject, but in the structure. In this work the message is that technology will not only influence the materials or medium of a work of art, but it will also affect the works' role in society.”

– Michel Ségard, 
Editor, New Art Examiner
from "Artists Team Up for the Future,” New Art Examiner, January/1984, Volume 11, Number 4