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Current New Media Art theorypractices have developed from the Media Art Histories of Video Art. The Video Art of the 1970’s anticipated many specific New Media Art theorypractices. I trace these histories through the lens of experimental Media Art projects made in Chicago during the decade of the 1970’s by a group of artists and academics whose deeply collaborative artistic research and development led to the establishment of new technologies, approaches, organizations and Media Art projects.
In 2007 I initiated the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive in the Film, Video & New Media department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago through a generous donation from Morton’s surviving partner Barb Abramo. In Chicago, in the 1970’s, Phil Morton (founder of the Video Area and the Video Data Bank at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago) Dan Sandin (founder of the Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago) and Jane Veeder collaborated on realtime audio video projects that anticipated current New Media Art theorypractices as well as Open Source software and Free Culture. Artist-developers such as Phil Morton, Dan Sandin, Jane Veeder, Jamie Fenton, Larry Cuba, Ted Nelson, Tom DeFanti, Kate Horsfield, Lyn Blumenthal, Gene Youngblood, Steina and Woody Vasulka connected in Chicago during this time.
