Copying-it-right: Archiving the Media Art of Phil Morton - jonCates (2008) — In 2007 I initiated the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive in the Film, Video & New Media department @ The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This Archive contains Phil Morton’s “personal video databank” which stretches across 30 years of Media Art Histories that are specific to the early Video Art and proto-New Media Art communities in Chicago.

These communities were organized around shared ethical commitments and theorypractices, one of those being Phil Morton’s COPY-IT-Right ethic.

Schools such as The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and The University of Illinois at Chicago acted as incubators for the ideas and approaches that these communities shared. Students and faculty formed new departments and organizations that would develop into internationally recognized homes of artistic experimentation and technological development.

During the most active period of the early 1970’s until the 1980’s the people whose developing paths crossed and became deeply interwoven, forming the closely knit fabric of these communities were people such as: Dan Sandin, Jane Veeder, Timothy Leary, Jamie Fenton, Larry Cuba, Ted Nelson, Tom DeFanti, Kate Horsfield, Lyn Blumenthal and Gene Youngblood.

You may be familiar with some of those names, but the name Phil Morton may be unfamiliar to you. This is the situation that first began my interest in this project. I was unfamiliar with Phil Morton’s name. I wanted to see his work and wondered how had this Media Art History gotten lost, forgotten or repressed? More >>