We should place Marisa González's routes in Bilbao, the city where she was born and where she studied her Superior Degree in paino at the Music Conservatory. This formation was of great importance given that both classical and contemporary music have influenced her life and her profession in a very important manner.

She moves to Madrid in 1967 where she studies at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. From that moment on, she will become conscious of the limitations of the academicist and decimononic formation received at that school. Being, that she was, an important element in the student movements, she manages, among other revindications, the temporary substitution of some life-long professors by artists of great prestige, chosen by the students. Such was Eusebio Sampere' case, who was then experimenting with the first computers in the Complutense University of Madrid's Centro de Calculo, and who was able to discover new horizons in new technologies for a group of students.

In 1970, from the student Delegation, Marisa organized the first and free exhibition at Madrid's then Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes. (It was a formal complaint about the center's anachronism and isolation. All of the spaces were filled with pieces, both by students and by artists of the greatest prestige in the country.)

It was also in this year that the artist represented the newly created Asociación de Artistas Plásticos at the UNESCO International Congress on the superior education of Plastic Arts celebrated in Belgrade.

When she finished her studies in 1971, Marisa González decides to broaden her studies and acquire new experiences, reason for which she moves to the United States to study a Master program at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. Her inclination towards the new technological media can already be seen in this election. Here she will specialize in the area of video and photography, and joins the Generative Systems department, a pioneer center in the investigation of art and technology thanks to the strength of its founder and theorist, Sonia Sheridan. It is in this department where she discovers the languages and tools which will open new roads of experimentation and development of her own artistic languages. Her first creative works, between 1971 and 1973, were the self-portraits and human silhouettes of the "Massification, identity-less characters" series, created with interactive paper cut-outs (papers emulsified from the various copiers or their wastes), and soome of them, taken to the world's first 3M colour copier. An investigation around the sequence, the color, and the thermical properties of the different interactive papers.

Her first photographic pieces were done in Chicago's black neighborhood under the main theme of the doll and violation. The newspaper cut-out with the image of the sophisticated black doll which serves as the theme for pieces from the nineties, is also from this period.

This first stay in the United States coincides with the activie student movements against the Vietnam War in which she actively parcipated. In 1974 she moved to Washington D.C. where there in another great center for contemporary art teaching, the Corcoran School of Art. She enlists full-time in a specialization program for young professionals in absolute creative activity, a multidisciplinary surrounding.

It is during that period, in 1975, that she takes the photographs of women, fellow Corcoran School of Arts students, for the series on violence. These pieces were made transferring photographs to thermofax paper with the help of a recycled acetate photocopier which belonged to the Washington National Gallery of Art. The series was made up of 30 modular panels in a longitudinal sequence which was exhibited in the Corcoran and in New York in the Conceptual Art exhibition, with the narrative photolinguistic work "The Discharge", and in Madrid's Contemporary Art Museum in the Panorama 78 collective exhibition.

Further on, by chance, a block of accumulated detritus was discovered in a filter offered he the possibility of molding these forms creating similies of individuals with animal references in various situations, isolated or in groups. This brought forth the series "Lints" between 1976 and 1977. Marisa González created, with these, an installation in the Corcoran School of Art gallery. The work was registered in photographs which would later serve to generate new series.

Marisa González graduates in 1977 with a BFA and the Senior prize.
She has her first individual exhibition in Spain this year, in her native Bilbao.
She moves to Madrid in 1978. She retakes the broad photographical series "Lints" from where various sequence-panels derived created with the Xerox colour copier in New York. Once the sequences were studied and put together in studio in Madrid, they were transferred onto other supports. With this work she presents her first exhibition in Madrid: "Presences", at the AELE gallery, in January 1981, and at the first ARCO Art Fair in 1982.

She travels to Sonia Sheridan's studio in Chicago in 1980 and 1982
in order to prepare her thesis on Generative Systems to obtain her degree from Madrid's Facultad de Bellas Artes. There, with the B. & W. machine V.Q.C. (very quick copier) she prepared the series titled "In Sonia Sheridan's studio", a prolongation of the "Lints" series which in Madrid became a panel made up of 50 images, which was shown repeatedly. She is named "Network" by Sonia Sheridan in Spain.

She rescues various waste plaster objects from dumps which suggested fragments of the human body. She worked with them using the "Light Painting" technique. The series was shown at the Santander Bellas Artes Museum, among others.

From 1983 to 1986 she created various themes from roots bored by the sea which would later turn into sequences with organic materials. These elements were transported and inter-related in the moment when the machine captured the image, manipulating the light income in order to control the color in the trichromatic register, in a static pictoricist process of "light painting". Thus, the machine turns into the translator of the elements placed on the Canon copier's glass.

These pieces were presented in the Processes Culturel and New Technologies exhibition at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia inauguration, together with her first digital work "Self-portraits" created with the equifoment Sonia Sheridan presents in this exhibition. Parallelly, for this exhibition inaugurating the Reina Sofia Museum in 1986, she creates the project and coordinates the exhibition on Electrography, with a brief international revision. "Electronic Palette" where Sonia Sheridan shows, live, the Photo-Video-Computer digital equipment. Also, she presented a collection of the works done at the end of the 60's of "Drawing assisted by Computer" the Complutense University of Madrid Calculus Center.
She studies her doctorate courses in 1985, achieving best results, and she participates in the "Making Waves" Art and Sciences Symposium, invited by Sonia Sheridan in Chicago. She combines her professional activity with the sociocultural one during the years 1983 and 1990, joining the new Junta Directiva of Madrid's Asociación de Artistas Plásticos. She also joins the first Junta Directiva which transformed Madrid's Círculo de Bellas Artes, from where she will promote the I and II National Video Festival of Madrid's Círculo de Bellas Artes in 1984 and 1986.

In a trip to Onil, during this same year, she does her first photographic piece in a doll factory. The attraction the fragmented dolls brought, as well as the lined up iron molds, the serial manufacturing, the multiplicity of heads and extremities, the huge warehouses filled with cloned bodies... forced this piece to be retaken and broadly expanded in future projects throughout the next decade.

The I Nacional Congress on Fine Arts Investigation was celebrated
in 1.988 at Madrid's Fine Arts School. She presents the "Generative Systems" communication and coordinates the area on "Mechanic and Technical Imges".

Electrographic paintings

Throughout these years she recovers the material painting she had abandoned when she finished her studies in Madrid. This was so in order to integrate the eletrographic sequences of a temporary space into a pictorical plane, thus willing to unite the problems of color, texture, and format, the techniques of the past with those of the present, where the machine and the paintbrush move on together, on a same support, the same finality. In this manner, she creates the collages in the "series of musical graphies". In them she develops the only work with non-recycled objects of her whole artistic career, parting from schores written by contemporary composer friends such as Ramón Farran, Llorens Barber among others. With Javier Darias schores and music she creates the installation "Light in three times" in 1990, at the Alcoy Cultural Center, and at the Eusebio Sempere Centre's Gravina Palace in Alicante. The latter being in the program for the Alicante Contemporary Music International Festival.
Around the year 1990, she decides to recycle her own iconography, and once again rescues the doll theme, that of the multiplied dolls of heads and extremities, which she goes over with various techniques, both photographic and electrographic. "...I'm establishing a reading which breaks away from the realistic signs of suggestion via the representation through the fragmentation, manipulation, simulation, serialization and metamorphosis, both of images and of meanings.

Together with the development of these modular series, she participates in numerous Fax Art activities, mainly in international with the Sorbonne University of Paris doctorate group Art-Reseaux. (see interview)

Two years later, in 1992, she presents the modular piece made up of 10 units "Semblance to Juan Gris" in the international exhibition "Variaciones en Gris" organized by the Fundación Arte y Tecnología in Madrid's Centro Cultural de la Villa. Here she uses, for the first time, the newly invented, large format Canon Bubble jet A1 photocopier (ink injection impression). She continues investigating with this new tool, recovering from the pile of the 60's material, the photographs with which she creates the series "mine", "the violation" and a wide series of works uniquely based on the image of the newspaper cutout of the "black woman". This fragmented image, retouched on the photocopier's glass, generating a very complete autobiographical series "Glances in Time", made up of four epoques: "Wishes, Identity Vertigos, Territories and Silences".
In November of that same year she directs the Actual Art Workshop "Creation and Technology" in Madrid's Círculo de Bellas Artes. In this Workshop, as a closing ceremony, during one week she does and presents the "computer-workshop-concert Timescape" together with her partners John Dunn, Sonia Sheridan and Jamy Sheridan. Equally so, she creates the installation "Estación Fax-Fax Station" with the students from this workshop, with an international calling in real time, in the "Crisis-Culture-Crisis" exhibition at Madrid's Círculo de Bellas Artes in 1993.

Her new digital works are done with an important recycled element: the obsolete and out-dated computer from the 80's, the Lumena, a clonal personal computer, PCxt, with only 512K, granted by Sonia Sheridan, and whose photo-video computer system contains a powerful and versatile software invented by her pupil John Dunn which allows the artist numerous projects. In parallel, and unfinished, given she continues to work on it, the series "Portraits" is begun, generated with these equipment and shown at the Bilbograph 95 in Bilbao's Rekalde Gallery, with 20 sequences of 180 images of this series, conceived and effectuated with the Lumena. Thus, she also had, in this exhibition, an interactive workshop and an international "Estación Fax-Fax Station" calling, with participation from over 10 countries and numerous artists on the theme: "Individual body, social body, infected body, contaminated body".

During these years, with the same Lumena equipment, she does another series of great repercussion, that of the clonals with she develops in a very extense manner, and which she will present on different supports (digital photography, slide projections and video installations) and which will be shown in various exhibitions. Actually, the series on the clonals "Broken Dreams-Broken Silences will be shown in many galleries, in ARCO 95 and in the Tarazona Foto International Photography Festival, in the Gijon Photography Festival and in Huesca-imagen. She obtains the Zurbarán Prize for Creation of the Junta de Extremadura in 1995.

Also in 1995, in Montreal and together with Sonia Sheridan and Nell Tenhaaf among others, she participates in the exhibition "What happened to the pioneers?", celebrated at the Galerie Arts Technologiques, curater by Monique Brunet during the ISEA Congress (International Symposium for Electronic Art), and presents a conference at the Quebec University. Her work contnues in expanding the series "serialized bodies-programmed bodies-cloned bodies", with which she intends to complain about the programmed massification to which the individual in present society is summited. "The invented body, the psycho-technological face of the body, is represente combining the intervention of Physics and Psychology in the visual sequence, through dreams, sequences, in a modified, altered body. The material image, the manufactured icon, approved, extracted from its initial context, stays in an unreal context, in a sensorial recepient space, represented by virtual images. A piece which will bring forth another installation, "The Mirror of the Clonals" (December 1996-January 1997)
i the exhibition "Echoes of Matter. Dialogues between Spanish and Portuguese artists", in Badajoz's Museo Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (MEIAC), curated by José Ramón Danvila. In this occasion, the installation is made up of some sequences of original Generative Systems interactive papers, light boxes and video projection.

Her important link to music, which we have already mentioned, will be seen in pieces such as the video of the scenery in the contemporary opera "Scenes from daily life", by Gregorio Esteban, with music by Marisa Manchado represented in 1997 at the Teatro de la Abadía during Madrid's Autumn Festival. A new work by Marisa González will come from these images: The electronic opera video poem "Dreams", with music by Pedro Garhel.

Together with the former pieces, again an accidental encounter in 1996 will be key in the development of the series Deviations and Deviations II. The first was about photographs of deformed lemons found in one unique tree, whose fruit she rescues throughout two consecutive years and in different stages. Once the lemons were in the studio, she would take numerous photos of them, month after month, following the aging and deterioration suffered by nature. The author's eye observes these photographs as a reference to the human body, to the most intimate, its sexual organs. The transformation has been done, in this series, through nature's own degeneration. Contrary to this, in the series "Deviation II, strawberries", the malformations are genetically produced, by science, through digital manipulation. She is presented in ARCO 2000 with the photographic series "Hiperphotographic registers Deviations II", a modular panel of 15 photographs and an interactive CDRom. This series, against nature's own degeneration, leads us to think that the genetic manipulation of the crops degenerates into the slow disappearing of the Earth.

The different projects overlap each other, and again another accidental encounter open the doors to the present work, The Factory. The first registers are from 1998, when she became conscious of the forthcoming demolition and disappearance.

The different projects overlap each other, and again another accidental encounter open the doors to the present work, The Factory. The first registers are from 1998, when she became conscious of the forthcoming demolition and disappearance of the largest flour and bread factory during the XX Century in Bilbao. Consist of a series of hiper photographic landscapes interior and exterior, and the installations The Silo, The Luminaries, and an interactive CD-ROM and a video installation in three screens. This project is enlarged in the web with an interactive Net Art :with a call to participation on the feedback : www.fundacion.telefonica.com/at/lafabrica

"The destroyed Factory".

This proyect The Fáctory , hiperfotographic recording and instalations , has been produce by The Fundación Telefonica and exhibited in at the Fundación´s Halls in Madrid in the official section with Yasumasa Morimura in the International Festival of Fotography PH00 in Madrid.

This exhibition The Factory is travelling all along Spain , in Vitoria in the III International Seminar in Industrial Arquitecture and also in Bilbao under La Sala Rekalde in an remodel old electrical factory , as well as in The Horno de la Ciudadela in Pamplona.

In 2002, she discovers again in Bilbao, a new project. She gets to know that the demolition of the .Nuclear Plant LEMONIZ starts. This huge industrial complex , built in the 70´s, never got to function by different matters, among them political and ecological´s ones.

She got the permissions to enter in the secluded and controlled area, to video and photography record the monumental spaces, and rescue objets in order to use them to make the installations.
With all of this material she built the new extensive project about the Central Nuclear.
The project has been built in 3 phases, the first one is about security and is call Nuclear LMNZ /control mechanisms. Produce and exhibited at CAB, the Burgos Contemporary Art Center in Spain.

Parallel to this project she is working on a new Net Art project with the Cervantes Institute about the Spanish language.

Marisa González's work maintains various constants, both formal and conceptual which can be perceived in practically all her pieces, and with a common denominator: The use of technology (together with the necessary social conscience) and the recycled, with the help of instruments of her time: photography, electrography, video and computer. By her experience and work we can define her as a multimedia artist and one of the pioneers in the art and technology research.