John Sanborn (born 1954) is a key member of the second wave of American video artists that includes Bill Viola, Gary Hill, Dara Birnbaum and Tony Oursler. Sanborn's body of work spans the early days of experimental video art in the 1970s through the heyday of MTV music/videos and interactive art to digital media art of today.
Overview
Sanborn's work has manifested itself on television ("Alive from Off Center", MTV, "Great Performances", PBS), video installations ("V+M"), "The Temptation of St. Anthony"), video games ("Psychic Detective"), Internet experiences ("Paul is Dead", "Dysson") and multi-media art. He is known for collaborations with virtuosic performers, contemporary composers and choreographers. His oeuvre primarily addresses the themes of music, mythology and memory.
Background
In the late 1970s Sanborn was one of the artists-in-residence at TV Lab at Thirteen/WNET, an experimental environment started by the Rockefeller Foundation and Nam June Paik as a playpen for video artists to create works for broadcast television. He also created works for the VISA series (originated by Paik) and showed installations at the Whitney Museum, participating in two Biennial Exhibitions.
In the 1980s Sanborn was an artist-in-residence at the 1980 Winter Olympics "Olympic Fragments" as well as one of the first directors with work appearing on MTV where he created over 30 music/videos including works with Nile Rodgers, Rick James, Sammy Hagar, Philip Glass, Tangerine Dream, Peter Gordon, Grace Jones, King Crimson and Van Halen. At the request of Jim Fouratt at the nightclub Danceteria, he created the first "video lounge" and hired video artists to VJ video clips and video art. The lounge became a cultural phenomenon in New York City.
In January 1984 he contributed to "Good Morning Mr. Orwell," a live satellite TV event created by Nam June Paik. With Dean Winkler he orchestrated segments of the show, and their music/video for Philip Glass, "Act III", opened the broadcast.
Long associated with experimental composers, Sanborn developed and directed "Perfect Lives", the seminal opera for television, by composer Robert Ashley. Working closely with Ashley's "band" over the course of 5 years, Sanborn developed a visual language for the opera that set it apart when it premiered in 1983 and has made it an iconic and influential work ever since. The full opera took 5 years to make its way to television, with a "pilot" called "The Lessons" setting the stage for the original work.
Sanborn went on to create his own media operas, including "2 Cubed" commissioned by the electronic arts festival Ars Electronica, in Linz Austria.
He created performance-based video works for the PBS series "Alive from Off Center" including "Untitled" with Bill T. Jones,"Fractured Variations and Visual Shuffle" with Charles Moulton, "Geography | Metabolism" with Molissa Fenley, "Luminare" with Dean Winkler and music by Daniel Lentz, and "Endance" with Tim Buckley. "Sister Suzie Cinema" created for "Alive TV" with Lee Breuer and Bob Telson won several awards, including the 1986 Mayor's Medal for the Arts in New York City.
Sanborn's practice has always included collaboration with other artists, including John Zorn, Nam June Paik, Philip Glass, Twyla Tharp, Peter Lynch (director), Peter Vronsky, David Van Tieghem, Mikhail Baryshnikov, David Gordon, and The Residents which continues to this day.
Sanborn worked in the early days of High-Definition Television, creating works for SONY ("Infinite Escher"), and NHK-TV. Electronic Arts Intermix has distributed his video art since his first project, "The Last Videotapes of Marcel Duchamp." In 2016 Heure Exquise began distributing his work in Europe.
In the 1990s Sanborn worked in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, developing technology based entertainment start-ups ( imoviestudio, The Wireless Fan Club), interactive movies ("Psychic Detective") and some of the first web-based interactive content ("Paul is Dead") as well as a sit-com for Comedy Central ("Frank Leaves for the Orient") and pilots and scripts for Columbia Tri-Star, USA Network, MTV, MGM ("Stargate SG1"), and the National Lampoon.
A project launched by LaFong (Sanborn's partnership with writer Michael Kaplan) was "Dysson," an interactive story where the audience was injected into a murder mystery via e-mail and chat bots. Enrolled without their knowledge into the experience, the response was vivid and reactionary, including a harsh pushback from Eric Idle of "Monty Python" fame.