"I had heard about Lyn long before I met her in the mid-70's and I had heard strange and wonderful things. When I finally met her, suddenly there she was across the room, and because there were so many wild and fantastic stories and rumors that had sprung up around her, suddenly I felt pretty much like the way a hunter feels when they first see a deer that they've been stalking for years. There she is! I had been cautioned that she was somehow dangerous and yet I liked her right away. I started talking to her and I liked her, and I thought this person isn't the terrorist that I've been told about." — John Manning, Professor of Art and Technology, School of the Art Institute of Chicago   " Lyn Blumenthal had a passion for image, and the immanence of desire within the image. She recognized the power of the media and desired to reconstruct it. Lyn was fearless, unafraid to be criticized in a community that some considered small for constructive derision. At heart, she was a feminist, a passionate supporter of sexual difference, and an outspoken voice for sexual preference. Lyn was a brave champion of all artists struggling to decode the hallucinatory world which has re-presented the world of reality, the spectacle (now fact) called television. She was a natural entrepreneur even before business became art. Lyn wore her many hats with the panache of high Japanese fashion. IN my mind's eye she has scale, she is grande. " — Bruce Yonemoto, artist   "The day we opened the library in the new school building (at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, September, 1976) here on Columbus Drive, Lyn and Kate appeared at the door at nine o'clock in the morning and said "We're the Video Data Bank, where's our office?" What office? Nobody even thought that to run the Data Bank you might need an office and a telephone, and even a desk! So we opened up a little closet in the back of the library which was about three feet by three feet, and we put in a counter and a telephone and we said: "There's your office!" And for at least a year, or maybe more, the two of them, well not both at once, but one at a time, sat in this little closet; and from that tiny space, they built this world wide operation called the Video Data Bank. That is how I remember Lyn, building something that good and that big out of this tiny little three by three broom closet." — Nadine Byrne was the Librarian in the John M. Flaxman Library at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.    "In the summer of 1984, the Video Data Bank was doing the first Video Drive-In at Grant Park. They were presenting the Science of Fiction / The Fiction of Science, which were two evenings of video projected onto a big screen that was hung in the bandshell in Grant Park, Chicago. The crowds were expected to be about 5,000 people each night and it was also supposed to rain that weekend. Both Lyn and Kate were very worried that this was going to ruin the Drive-In. As part of my professional duty working in the Office of Public Programs and Information at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I was asked to call a special pilot's weather service every hour to find out the forecast. I would report in every hour, but most of the time I couldn't get back to Lyn and Kate on the phone because they were over in Grant Park cleaning off all of the 5,000 metal chairs with paper towels, so that when the audience did come they could sit on dry chairs. To me that's an image of their generosity and how important it was that video reach the public." — Cynthia Chris has just finished her PhD.in Media Studies at University of California, San Diego.