Restructuring Realities is currently on display at the Ely Center for Contemporary Art.
“One way to look at this machine, or for that matter, any process in the universe, is to distinguish it into a set of classes that have to do with inputs, processes, and outputs,” says inventor Dan Sandin in his 1973 short video “Five-Minute Romp Through the Image Processor,” where he demonstrates the capabilities of his own analog video synthesizer by using it to distort his appearance in real-time, all while wearing a funny hat.
Monica Panzarino resurrects this Sandin in her 2024 short video “Eight Minute Romp Through SAIC's Sandin Image Processor,” which intersperses clips from Sandin’s original footage with new video of Panzarino and fellow artist James Connolly distorting their images in a similar manner, using the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Sandin Image Processor and hand-knit funny hats.
The video, which is currently on display at the Ely Center for Contemporary Art as part of Kit Young’s exhibition Restructuring Realities, explores the relationship between efficiency, logic, and reality. The show, which went up June 7, is open through July 5 at the Ely Center’s temporary home in CitySeed’s 162 James St. hub.
Sandin’s original quote exemplifies a logic of linearity and efficiency specific to the worlds of machines and finance, where means can be discretely distinguished from ends, and ends are ends because they are so. As Sandin points out, this is the logic of the image processor, which converts captured light into information, alters the information mathematically, and presents the results in the form of pixels.
Sandin wearing a funny hat. Still from “Five-Minute Romp Through the Image Processor.”
Despite its aptitude for advancing scientific reason and bolstering technological progress, this logic risks reducing things with inherent value, like life or art, into legible, commodifiable units of utility.
Among other things, Panzarino’s video challenges this logic of ruthless efficiency and Sandin’s claim that it is inherent to all processes in the universe. The soundtrack, a long and discordant electronic drone, refuses efficiency. It doesn’t conform to any established musical form, nor is it monotonous distortion absent of pitch altogether. It is slow, winding, and harsh, forcing the listener back into reality with every crackle.
The visual component of the work, too, refuses legibility and commodification. Across the eight minutes of video, the artist-subjects seldom look like themselves, morphing between psychedelic sunny-day pinks and blues, and noir-tinted hot whites like candle flames. By casting the supposedly objective and analytical machine as the architect of unreality, Panzarino forces the audience to consider how objective-oriented logic might be obfuscatory.
Panzarino excludes parts of Sandin’s original video in which he explains the inner workings of the processor from“Eight-Minute Romp,” instead highlighting the machine’s artistic capacities. Panzarino and Connolly appear spontaneous and at play as they turn the dials to strobe away their own images in rainbow light, leaving behind the contours of a strange, kaleidoscopic monster.
By concealing the mechanism by which the processor transforms reality into image, Panzarino allows the mass of wood and dials to mold into that monster. No longer a rational system of information, it becomes an instrument of whim, an incomprehensible, superhuman, reality-bending terror like one of H.P. Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones.
Still from “Xeno-Euphoria.”
Micah Alhadeff’s “Xeno-Euphoria,” also part of Restructuring Realities, similarly finds an inhuman, cosmic force in technology.
Set to a speedy, rhythmic drum and bass soundtrack, “Xeno-Euphoria” imagines an interdimensional rave hosted in a pulsing neon UFC-style ring.
The ravers, two colossal cyborgs both danced by Charlotte Anderson, move like an electron cloud: perfectly, stochastically synchronized with themselves and the music. As one dancer leans backward into the soundsystem, the other leans into the corner of the ring. They spin simultaneously and stand, facing away from each other and separated by a body’s width of empty space.
Nevertheless, they stay synchronized as they hold their arms up like statues and pivot robotically back toward the center of the ring. The coordination between the dancers makes their choppy, unnatural movements appear smooth and rehearsed; the rave seems to be at once the spontaneous production of the ravers themselves and a routine designed by the forces of nature. It is as if the movements themselves had waited latent in the space for bodies with which to actualize themselves.
Or, perhaps, it is some cosmic, machinic force like Panzarino’s image processor that puppets the dancers. A humanoid figure, shadowy and still, looms over the ring. Auroral bands of blue and green light encircle the night sky above its unmoving head. Though humanoid, the figure is still weird, uncanny, Lovecraftian. Maybe it, not the empty space, is the externalization of the rave.
“Xeno-Euphoria” takes its name from a chapter in McKenzie Wark’s 2023 book “Raving,” which explores the dancefloor as an extradimensional, alien world capable of evoking from mechanized bodies the liberatory, creative potentials of the hivemind.
Alhadeff’s neon world calcifies these playful abstractions into concrete realities; when the ravers are called up to the dancefloor— perhaps from an everyday, human world— their cyborg flesh, mechanized for labor, becomes the stimulant propelling them into rhythmic ecstasy.
Across the room from “Xeno-Euphoria” is Deborah Barnagozzi’s “Approach,” a 23-inch television chronicling the landing of an airplane. Similar to “Eight Minute Romp,” “Approach” scrutinizes the impact of total optimization and computerization on the human relationship with reality.
“Approach” starts as a grainy first person window view of an airplane descending over the suburbs. Highway, intersections, and bleak, standardized housing bleed into masses of pavement and shingles. Slowly, the plane’s shadow emerges from the blur and swells as the aircraft approaches the ground. Within it, images from the previous frames endure, as real as the rest of the landscape.
The plane moves quickly, passing between tumors of hot concrete and green enclaves. As it flies, the ground below it blurs, as if engulfed in haze, adding a sweltering, stuffy feeling to the piece. In the haze, objects seem to lift off the ground like a mirage, their shadows shifting unnaturally.
As the plane nears the ground, its shadow expands over the runway, dividing the screen in two. Images warp between frames of video, flickering black and white like zombified memories. In this world of unadulterated logic, time and reality decay into processes, into inputs and outputs. Everything on the ground is mirage, but Barnagozzi shines through it, illuminating the humid, apathetic depression incurred from living in an image.
After the wheels touch down, a PA address echoes through the headphones. Most of it is unintelligible, except for the final word: “Information.”
Restructuring Realities is currently on display at the Ely Center for Contemporary Art, 162 James St., through July 5. Tal Berkowitz is a graduate of the 2025 cohort of the Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI). He is a rising senior at Wilbur Cross High School.