The Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive Collection

Video Data Bank is proud to house the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive (PMMRA), an archive of early video and media art created and collected by artist and instructor Phil Morton and his students and collaborators. The collection includes nearly 800 videos, a large portion of which documents the emergence of experimental video and media art education in Chicago during the 1970s. VDB is dedicated to fostering awareness and scholarship of early video and media art history and ensuring knowledge of this history is available to future generations. The PMMRA is a vital part of this work as well as to Chicago’s experimental video art community, and we are thrilled to provide access to this important collection. 

Browse The Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive collection

Phil Morton and his collaborators

Phil Morton taught at the School of the Art Institute from 1969 to about 1983. In 1970, he founded the first iteration of SAIC’s video department, then called Video Area, which offered degrees in video art at the BFA and MFA levels–the first higher education school to do so in the United States. The class used the Sony Portapak, the first consumer video tape recorder which was introduced to the market in 1965; by the 1970s, it was embraced by artists, activists and others who recognized video as a revolutionary tool for creation and dissemination. During his tenure at SAIC, Morton instructed students in using video for recording, editing, creating special effects, and more. 

Morton frequently collaborated with experimental media artists in Chicago including Jane Veeder, Dan Sandin, Tom Defanti, Barbara Sykes, Jamie Fenton, Bob Snyder, and Jim Wiseman. The Video Area also welcomed visiting cultural and counter-cultural luminaries such as Steina and Woody Vasulka, Gene Youngblood, Timothy Leary, Barbara Buckner, and others. In their collaborations, they explored the possibilities and tested the limits of video as a means of documentation and as a form of art in its own right. 

One of Morton’s collaborators, Sandin, developed the Sandin Image Processor (IP), a modular analog video synthesizer that could modify video signals in real time. In 1973, Morton worked with Sandin to build a copy of the IP and in the process, they created schematics and instructions which they called the Distribution Religion. The document advocated for sharing knowledge about technology freely, an academic ideology that was present in schools and universities during the 1950s and 1960s, but was on the decline outside of academia in the 1970s due to commercial interests in software development. (In 1974, the US Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works determined software could be copyrightable.) The Distribution Religion inspired Morton to develop COPY-IT-RIGHT, an anti-copyright approach to sharing media art widely, and an early model of the Creative Commons license and the open source software movement. Sandin IPs and other image processing equipment are still housed at SAIC and used for media art education and training.

With the IP and other synthesizer tools, the ability to edit and generate video in real time led to live-video events organized and performed by Morton and his collaborators, notably Sandin, Defanti, and Sykes. The Electronic Visualization Events (EVE) took place in 1975, 1976, and 1978 at the University of Illinois Circle Campus (now University of Illinois Chicago). 

While teaching and developing the Video Area, Morton also amassed a collection of more than 200 videotapes to create the Video Data Bank, a video tape resource for SAIC students and faculty and a precursor to what Video Data Bank is today.* The collection included student and faculty created video, video tapes received in exchanges with other video programs around the country, lectures at SAIC by visiting artists and notable figures such as Philip Glass, Ram Dass, and more, all of which was to be available for the SAIC community to access and use whenever they wanted. These videos and documentation of the EVE happenings are part of the PMMRA collection. 

In the spirit of Phil Morton’s COPY-IT-RIGHT ideology, all PMMRA titles on Video Data Bank’s website are available to watch for free. Visit a title’s artwork page to view. 

Creation and Preservation of the PMMRA 

Around 2007, artist and (former) SAIC professor jonCates received a generous donation of Morton’s personal archive from Morton’s surviving partner Barb Abramo, with tape formats including ½” open reel, U-Matic, and VHS. Shortly thereafter, Cates established the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive within the Film, Video, New Media and Animation department at SAIC. The PMMRA sought to coordinate and freely distribute Morton’s Media Art work and associated research under Morton’s COPY-IT-RIGHT license. In 2023, jonCates donated the PMMRA to Video Data Bank. Preservation of the PMMRA is ongoing. To inquire about the status of a particular title or tape, contact info@vdb.org. 

To read more about Phil Morton’s COPY-IT-RIGHT approach, see: jonCates. (2009). COPY-IT-RIGHT! Media Art Histories of Open Collaboration and Exchange. [Media Art Histories Masters Thesis, Danube University Krems].

*Management of the Video Data Bank collection was passed to Kate Horsfield and Lyn Blumenthal in 1976 who established VDB as an international distributor for video by and about contemporary artists.