Art at the Dawning of the Electronic Era: Generative Systems

Notes

Physical copy in the collection. The history of Generative Systems, the department Sonia Landy Sheridan founded at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1970 to put copiers, scanners, video and early computers in art students' hands. Sheridan edits and introduces it. Four essays follow: Jacob Lillemose, "Through the Electric Doors of Perception"; Jo-Anne Green, "Generative Systems: (Re)Producing Hands and Faces"; John Mabey, "Generative Systems and the Transmission of Presence"; and Willard Van De Bogart, "The Generative Systems Digerati: Hands and Faces Go Digital". Artist sections are in two parts. "The 1960s: The Precursors to the 1970s" covers Stan VanDerBeek, Sheridan herself, COSMO (Robert Frontier and Bill McCabe), Leif Brush, Douglas Dybvig and Joan Lyons. "The 1970s to 1980s: Fun Times" covers John Dunn, Marisa Gonzalez, Greg Gundlach, Pete Lekousis, Philip Malkin, Brian Oglesbee, Martha Loving Orgain, Mitch Petchenik, Marilyn Goldstein Schultze, Glenn Sogge, Laurie Spiegel and Willard Van De Bogart. Contributors' notes are at p. 89. The artists write in the first person about their machines. Joan Lyons's section, for example, describes making images on the 1950s non-automatic Haloid Xerox copier: toner images on onionskin were transferred to the final paper by drawing a negative charge through a straight pin wired to the processor's charge rail, a procedure devised by Robert Gundlach. She also transferred images to aluminium plates and printed them on a Rutherford offset proofing press at the Visual Studies Workshop. Her Drawing From the Hip (Rochester, 1976; Haloid-Xerox transfers on rag paper with added pencil) is reproduced on p. 45. Publisher and year to confirm from the copyright page.