In 1973, Chicago artist and scientist Dan Sandin debuted the Sandin Image Processor, a groundbreaking analog computer that enabled users to create astonishing video effects in real time. By encouraging other artists to “copy-it-right,” he paved the way for the production of dozens of image processors across the United States, making the machine one of the most influential tools for video experimentation and performance of its era. More than 50 years later, the Sandin Image Processor continues to inspire, connecting artists, hardware developers, and computer programmers across generations. To mark this anniversary, this program brings together a range of works created with the Sandin Image Processor over the years, including two new commissions by artists Lee Blalock and Jon Satrom. Additionally, real-time artist James Connolly will present a rare live public demonstration and performance on one of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s own Sandin Image Processors, echoing Sandin’s legacy of education, improvisation, and artistic experimentation.
Presented in partnership with Video Data Bank and Media Burn Archive.
Followed by a conversation with Dan Sandin, Lee Blalock, Jon Satrom, and James Connolly. Audience members will also have an opportunity to engage directly with the Sandin Image Processor in the theater.
1973–2025, USA
Format: Digital; live performance
In English
80 minutes followed by discussion
PROGRAM
Documentation from Spiral 1
Dan Sandin, Tom DeFanti, Bob Snyder, 1975; introduced by Phil Morton, ca 3 min
In 1973, Dan Sandin and Tom DeFanti co-founded the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. By the mid-1970s, EVL began staging a series of groundbreaking live performances known as Electronic Visualization Events (EVE), which combined real-time video processing using the Sandin Image Processor with computer graphics and synthesized sound. This footage documents a performance of Spiral I from the very first EVE event in April 1975. The video opens with Phil Morton—artist, educator, and frequent Sandin collaborator—introducing the performers.
Colorful Colorado
Phil Morton with Stuart Pettigrew, 1974, ca 7 min
Phil Morton built the second-ever Sandin Image Processor. In doing so, he also collaborated with Dan Sandin to develop a comprehensive set of plans for the device, enabling artists and technologists around the world to build and use it themselves. In Colorful Colorado, Morton uses the Image Processor to transform footage from a road trip through Colorado into a surreal and psychedelic landscape.
To Deborah, Love Videots, excerpt
Phil Morton and students, ca 1973, ca 3 min
In this excerpt, Phil Morton, who founded the Video Area at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, explores the social and aesthetic possibilities of video and emerging communication technologies during a feedback session with faculty and students. The conversation centers on an incoming applicant’s portfolio, but rather than following a top-down, prescriptive format, Morton moderates the discussion from within the group—modeling a decentralized, non-hierarchical approach to teaching and critique. This recording is part of the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive (PMMRA), a collection of early video and media art created and compiled by Morton, his students, and collaborators. PMMRA was founded by former SAIC FVNMA professor jonCates and is now housed at the Video Data Bank.
Spiral PTL
Dan Sandin, Tom DeFanti, Mimi Shevitz, 1981, 7 min
The fifth in a series of works exploring the spiral form, Spiral PTL—short for “Perhaps the Last” or “Praise the Lord”—uses the Sandin Image Processor like a musical instrument, transforming the spiral into a dynamic, gyrating image. The visuals evolve in tandem with a shifting soundscape that ranges from electronic buzzes and Space Age voices to the gentle sounds of running water. Spiral PTL was featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s inaugural video art collection.
Video Haiku: Waking
Barbara Sykes and Rick Panzer, 1979, 2 min
Video Haiku: Waking opens with layered superimpositions of the artist’s face, producing a trance-like, meditative effect. For artist Barbara Sykes the piece is “a study of motion visually displayed as light. Movement is electronically captured with the quality of charcoal on paper. Rhythmically, the image as energy expands, reaches a summit, and then disappears. Momentarily, traces of its path are perceptible.” Video Haiku: Waking was featured in SIGGRAPH 1982: Art Show ’82.
“I don’t want you to think this is the first time I’ve been on television”
Jane Veeder, 1979, 1 min
In this short work, artist Jane Veeder creates a generative feedback loop between a camera and the Sandin Image Processor, producing a dynamic visual field. As her images evolve, Veeder narrates a story that illuminates both the conventions and untapped possibilities of television in the 1970s.
Beaver Valley
Janice Tanaka, 1980, 7 min
“In [Beaver Valley], Janice Tanaka stresses…the means by which women are daily seduced into acceptance of historic roles and various forms of reality.” —Ann-Sargent Wooster, Afterimage
In this biting critique, Tanaka uses the Sandin Image Processor to manipulate and reframe representations of women drawn from television, commercials, and Hollywood films. These are juxtaposed with images of the artist lying next to her own double, underscoring themes of fragmentation and cultural conditioning. Tanaka built her own Image Processor, which she used in many early works to deconstruct the visual rhetoric of government and commercial media.
Arcade
Lyn Blumenthal and Carole Ann Klonarides, 1984, 10 min
“[Arcade] includes a series of images recycled from television and film, interspersed with location footage of Chicago El stations and punctuated with paintings created by [artist Ed] Paschke on a computerized paint box. Flashing insights and lights, the ready-made imagery presents a sideshow of current concerns playing on the slippage between the televised and the real.” — Judith Russi Kirshner, Artforum
5t4t35 of 4lt
Lee Blalock, 2025, 6 min
5t4t35 of 4lt, commissioned for The Radical Art of the Sandin Image Processor, is part of Lee Blalock’s ongoing series Ev3ryd4y Cyb0rg TV, which explores the electronic transformation of bodies and consciousness. In this episode, a woman drifts into a dream state and awakens in a realm suspended between the familiar and the fantastical. There, she encounters a geometric guide who leads her through a vividly textured world populated by stoic, enigmatic figures.
vevves from teh Front Porch
Jon Satrom, 2025, 6 min
Commissioned for The Radical Art of the Sandin Image Processor, vevves from the Front Porch channels Jon Satrom’s decades-long entanglement with the Image Processor. Working with SAIC’s machine, Satrom merges legacy circuitry with contemporary computation to produce a flowing fusion of analog pulses and AI hallucinations. The result is both a meditation on the strangeness of the present and an homage to a time when video moved like thought and signals wandered like water.
Untitled [Fifteen-Minute Romp Through the IP]
James Connolly, 2025, live demonstration and performance, ca 15 min
Referencing Five-Minute Romp through the IP—Dan Sandin’s 1973 video that introduced users to the Sandin Image Processor—James Connolly’s live demonstration and performance showcases the full capabilities of this groundbreaking analog tool. Using dual live camera feeds, mixers, and an intricate network of patch cables, Connolly composes captivating audiovisual works in real time, harnessing generative oscillations, signal mixing, and advanced analog image processing.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Lee Blalock is a Chicago-based artist, 80D1punk, and educator. Interested in how technologies support the idea of impossible anatomies, behaviors, and performances, her work is an exercise in body modification by way of amplified behavior or “change-of-state.” Blalock’s interests include embodied cognition, anatomy and biomechanics, bionics, mechatronics, human/non-human entanglement, and computational abstraction. She has presented work domestically, internationally, and virtually at many institutions including Feral File; Ars Electronica; the wrong biennale; NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery; Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; 205 Hudson Gallery, New York; and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. Blalock is an associate professor in the Art & Technology / Sound Practices Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and practices various forms of embodiment as an everyday athlete.
James Connolly is a Chicago-based artist, educator, museum worker, and archivist. His videos, open-source tools, and real-time audio/video performances undermine the interfaces and break through the algorithms of digital and analog systems, examining hidden power structures and liberating latent aesthetic materialities in cathartic and captivating compositions. He has presented work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Currents New Media Festival in Santa Fe; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Intermediale’s Videosyntezy3 in Legnica, Poland; Bideodromo International Experimental Film and Video Festival in Bilbao, Spain; South by Southwest in Austin; the GLI.TC/H Festivals in Chicago; and the Vancouver New Music Festival, among others. He is an adjunct associate professor in the departments of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation and Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the collection manager of the Roger Brown Study Collection.
Dan Sandin is an internationally recognized pioneer of electronic art and visualization. He is director emeritus of the Electronic Visualization Lab and a professor emeritus in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. As an artist, he has exhibited worldwide and received grants in support of his work from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His video animation Spiral PTL is in the inaugural collection of video art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1969, Sandin developed a computer-controlled light and sound environment called Glow Flow at the Smithsonian Institution. By 1973, he had developed the Sandin Image Processor. He then worked with Tom DeFanti to combine the Image Processor with real-time computer graphics and performed visual concerts, the Electronic Visualization Events, with synthesized musical accompaniment in the 1970s and early 1980s. In 1991, Sandin and DeFanti conceived and developed, in collaboration with graduate students, the CAVE virtual reality (VR) theater at UIC. In recent years, Sandin has been concentrating on the development of auto stereo VR displays (i.e., free viewing, no glasses), and, on the creation of network-based tele-collaborative, VR art works. He is continuing his professional activities with Tom DeFanti at Calit2, University of California San Diego.
Jon Satrom is a Chicago-based artist, educator, and organizer who delights in digital detritus. He playfully problematizes media systems, interfaces, and conventions—scrambling the sanitized polish of tech with raw error, creative misuse, and humor. Through real-time performance, software art, and collaborations with both humans and machines, Satrom leverages glitches, kludges, crops, instability, and what’s been called “exhaustion aesthetics” to expose the cracks, contradictions, and biases embedded in our technological infrastructures. Through his boutique digital studio, studiothread, Satrom leads creative projects that raise funds and visibility for arts programming and cultural initiatives. As cofounder of netizen.org—a collective of media artists and educators—he advocates for a more critical, playful, and creative digital world. In his role as Assistant Senior Instructional Professor and Associate Director of the Media Arts and Design Program at the University of Chicago, Satrom shares his expertise and curiosity with the next generation of experimental artists and designers.
ACCESSIBILITY
Conversations at the Edge events have live captions (CART). The Gene Siskel Film Center is fully ADA accessible and its theaters are equipped with hearing loops. For other accessibility requests, please visit saic.edu/access or write cate@saic.edu.