Barbara Sykes

Barbara Sykes (Barbara Sykes-Dietze) (born 1953) into a family of artists, designers and inventors.

Since childhood, she has produced work in a variety of different art forms.

In the early 1970’s, Sykes worked as a commercial silk screener and then as an offset lithographer.

Bored with her career, she decided to start a new career in the electronic arts.

Much of Sykes' work from the 1970s such as The Poem (1975), Circle 9 Sunrise (1976), Movement Within (1976), Reflections (1976), Off the Air (1977), Environmental Symmetry (1978) and By The Crimson Bands of Cyttorak (1978) utilized the Sandin Image Processor to create tapes as montages of meditative, poetic abstractions and her multimedia installations and interactive performance environments.

While the nature of the Image Processor allows for limited analogue control, with much of the process left up to chance and experimentation, Sykes's mastery of the Image Processor distinguished her work from other artists in the field.

In 1974, she became one of Chicago's pioneering video and new media artists and, later to include, independent video producer, exhibition curator and teacher.

Sykes is a Chicago based experimental video artist who explores themes of spirituality, ritual and indigeneity from a feminist perspective.

Sykes is known for her pioneering experimentation with computer graphics in her video work, utilizing the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Chicago, at a time when this technology was just emerging.

Her early works broke new grounds in Chicago's emerging New Media Art scene, and continue to inspire women to explore experimental realms.

With a passion for community, she fostered significant collaborations with many institutions that include but are not limited to University of Illinois, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College, Center for New Television, and (art)n laboratory.

These collaborations became exemplary for the showcasing of new media work.

The wave of video, new media and computer art that she pioneered alongside many other seminal early Chicago New Media artists persists as a major influence for artists and educators today.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, at institutions such as Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (Copenhagen), Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Museum of the Art Institute (Chicago), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) and SIGGRAPH.

From 1974 to 1979 Sykes studied at the University of Illinois Chicago, during which experimental video art was developing in Chicago.

The Electronic Visualization Laboratory was started by two UIC faculty, Tom Defanti (Computer Science) and Dan Sandin (Fine Art), and was influential in developing computer graphics with the goal of creating video art.

The research lab known for developing the Sandin Image Processor, a video synthesizer is similar to synthesizers used to create music.

The Image Processor allows for abstract analogue visuals to be created using analogue computer graphics, a new technology at the time.

The lab was known for its Electronic Visualization Events (EVE), where live performances combined music and video processing in real time.

As a student of this new technology, Barbara Sykes quickly developed unprecedented skills using the Image Processor and produced a large body of groundbreaking work, that includes Sykes historically significant performances with Tom Defanti of The Poem during EVE I, 1975, and Circle 9 Sunrise during EVE II ,1976, at a time when such real-time performances were the first of their kind.

In 1977, Gene Siskel, film critic and host of Nightwatch, interviewed Sykes about her work and performance of Circle 9 Sunrise during this live television program on WTTW, PBS, Chicago.

Her later works evolved into lyrical video poems, mystical stories and experimental ethnographic documentaries that demonstrate more personal and expressive narratives and themes.

For EVE III, 1978, Sykes produced Electronic Masks and Sykes and Defanti co-produced By the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak and Duals together.

Real-time computer performances continue to be vitalized at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Notable, her pioneering figurative tapes, Electronic Masks (1978) and Emanations (1979), illustrate the innovative work created solely using the IP's oscillators and editing.

Before earning an undergraduate degree, Sykes enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, SAIC, emerging video program in 1979, and obtained her MFA in video, computers and performance in 1981.

While a student at the UIC, Sykes worked at their Media Production Center and as a freelance videographer and editor, producing dance, instructional and documentary videos.

Concurrently, she was a UIC teaching assistant for graduate and undergraduate classes, providing instruction on the Sandin Image Processor, field production and editing.

In graduate school at SAIC, she became proficient on the Rutt Etra Synthesizer and worked at the Video Data Bank co-coordinating Recent Work, a traveling video art exhibition, and documented visiting artists, including Ellen Fisher's performance, Call Her Amedia.

She was also a broadcast post-production editor and cameraperson for a weekly Greek variety program that aired on PBS in Chicago and shot Chicago dance performances in order to fund her tuition.

Sykes's tapes have been broadcast in Sweden, Italy, Puerto Rico and extensively throughout in the US, including "The Independents", PBS national broadcast, 1985, and national cablecast, 1984.

Media Burn has an online selection of her tapes and over 200 of her raw footage, master edits, dubs and compilation tapes in their Independent Video Archives @ Barbara Sykes https://mediaburn.org/collections/videomakers-page/barbara-sykes/.

Select grants include a National Endowment for the Arts and American Film Institute Regional Fellowship, Evanston Art Council Cultural Arts Fund and several Illinois Arts Council grants.

In 2017, Sykes began to paint.

In 2020, as the recipient of an Evanston Art Center Individual Artist Exhibition Award, Ethereal Abstractions, Sykes's first solo watercolor exhibition premiered 81paintings and she gave an online Artist Talk.

Her paintings are lyrical, colorful abstractions reminiscent of organic shapes, ethereal forms and underwater landscapes - evocative impressions of spiritual and elemental worlds.

They evoke the spontaneity and themes that have evolved from her previous body of time-based and digital artwork.

In 2021, she moved to Florida.

Her 2022 painting exhibitions/reviews include Forces of Nature showcased on the cover of Estero Life Magazine and she is in the article, Beholding Beauty: Artists of Estero Exhibit at COCO Art Gallery, the Florida Watercolor Society's 2022 Online Show, the 36th Annual All Florida Exhibition and Connections Art in Flight exhibit at the Southwest Florida International Airport, June 2022 to June 2023.

She paints under the name of Barbara L. Sykes.