Sandin, Daniel

1942–

Scientist and Artist

Daniel Sandin is a computer graphics/video artist and pioneer in the virtual-reality (VR) field who, along with Tom DeFanti, conceived the CAVE VR theater in 1991. Sandin was also responsible for the design and construction in the early 1970s of the Image Processor (IP), an analog computer for video image processing. His video work Spiral PTL (1980) is included in the film and video collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Sandin was born in 1942 in Rockford, Illinois, and earned a master's in physics from the University of Wisconsin in 1967. In 1969, he was hired by the faculty of the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC; then known as the University of Illinois Chicago Circle) with a mandate to bring computers into the art program. In 1972, Tom DeFanti, creator of the Graphics Symbiosis System (GRASS), a computer graphics programming language, joined Sandin at UIC. DeFanti had just completed the GRASS project as part of his Ph.D. thesis at Ohio State University. Sandin and DeFanti then formed the Circle Graphics Habitat, a research center at UIC that became the site of experiments in computer graphics and video art. Although there have been attempts to commercialize their early computer graphics and later VR hardware and software, Sandin and DeFanti have remained resolute in their desire to make the tools as widely available as possible to artists and others.

Inspired to some extent by the work that Robert Moog was doing with audio synthesis, Sandin sought to create similar instruments for those interested in video synthesis and processing. Informed by an early interest in radio and electronics, he went so far as to get the plans for Moog's synthesizer and teach himself electronic design. By 1973, he had designed the Image Processor (IP), which was essentially an analog video processor that allows video signals to be sent through [Page 399]individual processing modules, resulting in output to a color encoder and video or videotape. Much as musicians in the 1970s, thanks to Moog, were creating never-before-heard sounds with the audio synthesizer, the IP allowed video artists to create never-before-seen visual images, and to do so in real time. The IP led to later developments of special-effects technologies for film and video, and became the most widely adopted system among video artists.

Apart from the IP's value to video artists, another of Sandin's unique contributions stemmed from his desire to distribute the IP non-commercially. According to Sandin, the hope was that IP users would “learn to use High-Tech machines for personal, aesthetic, religious, intuitive, comprehensive, and exploratory growth.” The IP was therefore made available to video artists and not-for-profit organizations to build themselves; Sandin even included tips for soldering and buying parts in the plans for the IP.

A significant effort was underway at UIC in the 1970s to use technology in education, and Sandin and DeFanti sought to discover ways to use computer graphics and video in undergraduate education. An early project was the development of an introductory curriculum for the Department of Chemistry with a self-paced learning environment for the diverse student population of an urban university. Sandin and DeFanti combined the IP and the GRASS to create animations for the educational materials, and developed Circle Graphics Habitat into a production facility.

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