GENERATIVE SYSTEMS

Sonia Landy Sheridan

Over three decades ago a new program, Generative Systems was created at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the heartland of the America. It attracted students from around the globe. Students from Europe, South America, Asia, Canada, and in the United States from New York to California brought to the program their own culture, education and ideas. Upon return home they carried with them their unique ideas of what a generative system was. Among the very first was Marisa Gonzalez, from Madrid, Spain who, more than anyone from Europe, brought back to that continent her unique vision of a generative system. What then was Generative Systems that I founded a third of a century ago? How did we anticipate and participate in the communications revolution? What was Marisa's role in the dissemination of Generative Systems in Europe?
In its initial stage Generative Systems grew out of my own search for an art process appropriate to the times. By the 1960s, scientific discoveries were transforming our conceptions of time and space. New imaging devices were giving us views of inner and outer space never before seen. For example, first appearing in public about 1963 was a photograph of chromosomes, a basic component of life. It seemed to me that an awareness of genetics, time and motion had to be as crucial to art as to science; indeed, artists of all eras have had to come to grips with the science of their time. But in the early 1960s, schools of fine art seemed remote from the prevailing technological and social currents that promised to transform the world. While the industrial and commercial worlds had access to instant communication tools such as film and video, in art schools we had to communicate our ideas with 19th century tools. Therefore, as artist and teacher, it was natural that I first tried to deal with new scientific developments by using those traditional art tools: pens and brushes. I used pen and brush to draw imaginative genetic mutations, transformations, and metamorphoses. For the students, I created similar projects using those same traditional tools.
It was the social upheavals that convulsed American society in the 1960s that forced me to start thinking about looking for more appropriate tools. In the late 1960s in Chicago there was widespread protest against the Vietnam War. I and many other artists and students wanted to use our particular talents to support those protests. As a consequence, we suddenly needed the capacity to communicate quickly and dramatically with the public that we were trying to influence. We turned towards more modern tools. At the same time, The School of the Art Institute began to move in a similar direction. In the brief period of five years in the late 1960s the School of the Art Institute of Chicago set up classes in photography, film and video.
I set up a somewhat different program. With the assistance of the Advance Screen Company in Chicago I created a photo screening area that led me almost immediately to other commercial imaging systems such as the 3M Thermo-Fax. This made it possible for us to get images out to the public within a day. All of this made us more effective politically, but at the same time prompted us to think more deeply about the nature of art, of the artist's tools, and of the teaching of art. I was struck by the paradox that the art world appeared to be ever more commercially oriented -the gallery system dominated much of art- yet, on the other hand, it did not recognize art made with commercial tools as genuine, serious art.
Artists were wary; they did not wish to be swept up in a new technology at the expense of the "art", and therefore many opposed vigorously using for art purposes new communication tools designed for business use. They wanted industrial tools to be confined to industrial art schools. These concerns were not necessarily the fears of artistic Luddites; the instincts of the skeptics were often sound to the extent that, if used in the way they were designed to be used, the new tools offered little more than a highly constrained and mechanical art. But what could be done if they were used in ways for which they were not designed? I saw the need for a new area of study in which questions about the ways in which the kind of tools we use -manual, mechanical, electronic, photronic, etc.- determine our perceptions and how we record them. An approach to art education was required that would place tools in their proper place as an adjunct of the human mind and senses. It was also essential that such an approach build into its structure acceptance of change. This was one of the ways in which our thinking and our program anticipated the information age. It is in this context that Generative Systems emerged as a viable educational direction.
It is easy to see in retrospect how I was led to Generative Systems, but it was not so clear at the time. Generative Systems did not suddenly emerge in full bloom. It began in an empty closet-sized room without official sanction in 1969. In 1970 it became a regular course of study listed in the school catalogue as Energy Bank. Originally it was to be called "Reproduction Systems" since we had acquired from the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company the world's first color copier, the 3M Color-In-Color. Almost every image coming out of the machine however, was an original and I was not interested in reproduction, so the term Energy Bank was used. When the students took more energy out of the bank than they put in, the name was changed, fortuitously, to Generative Systems. At the time we had no knowledge that there had been a long history of Generative Systems dating back to the Greeks. Nor did we anticipate that in thirty years Generative Art would become a major field.
We were truly an energy center. Since we used the Color-in-Color machine in practically every conceivable way except for simple reproduction, it was necessary to know the machine inside and outside. Through studying its mechanics and its underlying principles, we soon began to understand energy in a new way. New to us were the energies of electrostatics, magnetics, and heat that were the basic components of the machine. When we soon after acquired a Telecopier (Fax), which used light, heat and sound as imaging devices we were able to add the dimension of imaging by sound to our energy repertoire.
The second year, much to our anguish, the color machine was removed, but this was eventually fortunate for our future for I was forced to think about Generative Systems without the excitement and work of electronic imaging. I was being asked where the art was in all this energy? How did the new rapid imaging and transmission equipment affect our thinking as artists? Instead of backing away from the technology when the color machine was returned the following year, I created a new course, Process I, followed the next semester by Process II. Process I allowed the students to experiment freely, without machines, with electrostatics, magnetics, heat, sound and transmission without respect to art. Process II gave the students access to the electronic equipment for experimental purposes. Finally, I created a course I called Homography, in which students used any and all of manual, mechanical, electronic, photronic, sound and biological means of imaging; Ultimately Homography became a course in the visualization of time through these various means. A major breakthrough came when John Dunn, teaching assistant, built a Zenith Z2D computer to add to the Radio Shack 8K computer that we acquired in 1975. It was during this period that John Dunn began his path toward the development of pioneer computer graphic systems for the PC that would lead to his founding of Time Arts in Glenn Ellen, California. After graduating, John Dunn continued to bring his new discoveries back to Generative Systems. This long desired acquisition of computers took us into the next technological stage.
With the creation of a computer course and courses in Generative Air, and Performance, Generative Systems offered a full-time art program, including graduate study. The philosophy and practice of the program had evolved and matured into the forms that would characterize Generative Systems for the next decade. It was an enormously dynamic and productive program, but others in the art school often misunderstood it. For example, because we used copy machines, we were labeled as "copier artists". Yet not only were copy machines only one of many tools that we used, but in fact we rarely used them to copy, to make exact reproductions. Rather, we used the principles upon which copy machines were based to create original images. Similarly, we used fax machines, but we rarely sent ordinary messages by fax. Instead, we used the sound transmission, which is at the heart of fax technology to create sound-based images. Eventually, the study of sound became an important element of the program, exemplified by the work of Lief Brush, who still works with sound at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.
It is understandable that outsiders should try to label us by our tool technology. That, after all, was traditionally the way to identify art areas: oil painting, water colors, lithography, and so on. Yet in fact we never labeled our courses in that way, because the specific tools involved were only incidental. That is how we could have one student building a computer, another developing 3D photography, a third working with sound transmission, a fourth manipulating heat sensitive papers, and so on. The true identifying feature of Generative Systems was an attitude, an approach to the world in general and to art in particular. It was an attitude that rejected the notion of art boundaries, the idea that some subjects and techniques were appropriate for art and some were not. In our philosophy, the world and all its tools were fair game for subject or object.
The Generative Systems attitude was extremely sensitive to and receptive to change, to continual and dynamic change in the interrelationships among technology, social conditions, and art. That attitude, of course, was particularly appropriate at a time when technological change was accelerating. But while we acknowledged and welcomed change, we did not reject traditional art, despite the accusations of our skeptics. We always saw ourselves as building on the past, not overthrowing it. We did, however, oppose the traditional mode of teaching art, and we sought to create a new system of art education that emphasized process and transformation, society and technological change; we wanted to bring the modern world into the ivory tower.
The philosophy of Generative Systems would have led to nothing without enormously talented teachers and students to implement it A number of well-known artists also lent their talents to the program. In a program that used industrial tools, we found natural allies in industry, especially industries with an imaging component in their products. The 3M Corporation was particularly helpful, not only in providing imaging tools, but in allowing 3M scientists to advise us and help in other ways. Dr. Douglas Dybvig and Don Conlin, in particular, repeatedly aided the Generative Systems program generally and me specifically. They participated in major exhibitions with Generative Systems artists, and they made it possible for me to work in 3M Color Research and Central Research Laboratories.
Scientists of the Apeco Corporation -a company that was developing a wet electrostatic color copier- also rendered us great assistance. Rudy Guzik, whom I mentioned above, was a physicist at Apeco. Robert Gundlach, of the Xerox Corporation, lectured for us, and helped with advice. Gundlach's son, Greg, subsequently joined our program as a student, and began the work on 3D photography for which he later acquired three patents. The support of industry was helpful not only directly by providing us aid and equipment, but also because it exemplified the multilateral relationships that we thought necessary in the new art activity we were developing. Industry was where the action was in terms of technological advances, and that was where we wanted to be.
The energetic and talented artists who contributed to the development of Generative systems came from the United States, Canada, India, Mexico, Argentina, France, Spain and several other countries. Marisa Gonzalez would prove to be the most dynamic of the European group.
When Marisa Gonzalez first walked into Generative Systems in 1971 she was bursting with ideas she wanted to express. The bubbling cauldron of activity, curiosity and experimentation occurring in the Generative Systems lab was an ideal environment for Marisa's search for a congenial means of expression. At first she worked with the "software" (the imaging papers and photo-receptive rolls) of the 3M Color-In-Color. Using little cutouts of men she burned and imaged sheet after sheet trying out every possible visual combination of effects without using the machine. In this way she was able to create a rapid metamorphosis of images. Marisa had a methodical way of working to get just the effect that she wanted. In a carefully systematic way Marisa gradually, through the years, adopted various new imaging systems. At all times she used the technology for her personal reflections. The technology did not control her; she controlled it.
When Marisa Gonzalez first walked into Generative Systems in 1971 she was bursting with ideas she wanted to express. The bubbling cauldron of activity, curiosity and experimentation occurring in the Generative Systems lab was an ideal environment for Marisa's search for a congenial means of expression. At first she worked with the "software" (the imaging papers and photo-receptive rolls) of the 3M Color-In-Color. Using little cutouts of men she burned and imaged sheet after sheet trying out every possible visual combination of effects without using the machine. In this way she was able to create a rapid metamorphosis of images. Marisa had a methodical way of working to get just the effect that she wanted. In a carefully systematic way Marisa gradually, through the years, adopted various new imaging systems. At all times she used the technology for her personal reflections. The technology did not control her; she controlled it.
With each new technology Marisa composed images as she might compose music in a most personal and intuitive way. I always assumed that her background in music helped her to understand that one note belonged to other notes. So one image in the process of becoming was part of a series of images making up one composition. She did not place one image on top of another until the final result was satisfying, rather she let the series of images make up the whole as each image emerged from the other. This was a generative system. The rapid possibility for metamorphosing made possible by electronic technology was accepted immediately by Marisa even when she used only the by-products (then called software) of the technology. A generative system was totally compatible with her perceptions of image making.
As the technology evolved so did Marisa for she understood the importance of generative systems as time based systems. As new software and hardware were being developed in the United States she returned periodically to keep abreast of the developments. One of these visits was to the Making Waves exhibition in the Chicago area in the 1980s. There she joined me, John Dunn, Dr. Douglas Dybvig and others in our demonstrations. By the mid 1980s she acquired a Time Arts computer graphic system that she is still using to this day. Thus she added to her earlier bank of technology i.e., painting and photography, the technologies of copier, fax, computer and its peripherals. In this manner her artistic growth developed along with the technology. During recent decades she has acquired technology that makes it possible for her to share her insights not only with museum visitors, but also globally on the Internet. Thus, by moving in time with the technology, while retaining the sensibility of the artist, Marisa has been able to expand her communication capacity. In her earlier work she revealed the metamorphosis of objects; now she reveals the metamorphosis of an industry in a changing town. This latest exhibition, showing the destruction of an old bread factory and the recreation of a new landscape in its place, is a further example of metamorphosis. But now that change is on a larger social scale. Just as Marisa broke the old Spanish wall of Tapies' painting with organic growth so she goes on to break down the hard factory wall into a landscape. This is a continuation, in time, of a process Marisa has been pursuing for thirty odd years.
So the time based systems have been for Marisa ideal tools by which to share her most private perceptions of change. Marisa truly understood that Generative Systems is an attitude, an outlook compatible with the new idea of science, of genetic and space discoveries. She understood that new tools were needed for new times. She knew that the visualization of time is a concept for her time, that it would project her art into the new century. She also saw the interconnectedness of generations. She sensed that she flowed from other artists as other artists would flow from her. She never thought of a generative system as anything other than generation to generation evolution. It is this conception of Generative Systems as an evolutionary system that, so many years ago, she took back to her homeland, Spain.
Marisa continually strove to keep the interaction of Generative Systems between the United States and Europe constantly alive. She organized and participated in exhibitions, workshops and lectures. In this way she kept informed of new developments in technology and brought those developments to Spain. In 1983 Marisa joined me along with Stan Vanderbeek, Greg Gundlach and other artists during my exhibition in Electra at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In 1986 Marisa organized and helped me keep running a Sonia Sheridan exhibit at Processos in the Reine Sofia Museum. She wrote an essay on electrographics for the Processos catalogue. To this exhibition I brought a Time Arts computer graphic system, Lumena, created by John Dunn. It was there that Marisa made her first computer graphics. In 1986 Marisa again invited me, along with John Dunn and Jamy Sheridan, to the Circulo Des Belles Artes where we all four gave lessons, lectures, visual and sound exhibitions of our work. These are just a few of the exchanges we had through the years with Marisa. Meanwhile in Spain and other parts of Europe Marisa generously shared information about Generative Systems with other artists and institutions for which she was often not recognized.
In sum, Marisa has been a major force in introducing and spreading the ideas of Generative Systems to Europe. As an index of her success, a quick search on the Internet will bring up a great number of European listings on genetic art and genetic systems. Around the globe there have been generative art conferences and exhibitions. Most recently a major conference of the International Society of Electronic Arts had a section Generative Art as Evolutionary art. Marisa has been a part of this current. A strong, unique Spanish artist, Marisa Gonzalez has carried on tradition while creating the new in a most generative way. Friday, May 05, 2000.

Sheridan Landy, Sonia: Professor Emerita, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1961-80; Founder, Generative Systems Program, Art Institute of Chicago, 1970; Honorary Editor, Leonardo: International Journal of Art Science Technology, at present. Guggenheim Fellow, 1973; National Endowment for the Arts, 1974, 1976, 1981.

GENERATIVE SYSTEMS

Sonia Landy Sheridan

Over three decades ago a new program, Generative Systems was created at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the heartland of the America. It attracted students from around the globe. Students from Europe, South America, Asia, Canada, and in the United States from New York to California brought to the program their own culture, education and ideas. Upon return home they carried with them their unique ideas of what a generative system was. Among the very first was Marisa Gonzalez, from Madrid, Spain who, more than anyone from Europe, brought back to that continent her unique vision of a generative system. What then was Generative Systems that I founded a third of a century ago? How did we anticipate and participate in the communications revolution? What was Marisa's role in the dissemination of Generative Systems in Europe?
In its initial stage Generative Systems grew out of my own search for an art process appropriate to the times. By the 1960s, scientific discoveries were transforming our conceptions of time and space. New imaging devices were giving us views of inner and outer space never before seen. For example, first appearing in public about 1963 was a photograph of chromosomes, a basic component of life. It seemed to me that an awareness of genetics, time and motion had to be as crucial to art as to science; indeed, artists of all eras have had to come to grips with the science of their time. But in the early 1960s, schools of fine art seemed remote from the prevailing technological and social currents that promised to transform the world. While the industrial and commercial worlds had access to instant communication tools such as film and video, in art schools we had to communicate our ideas with 19th century tools. Therefore, as artist and teacher, it was natural that I first tried to deal with new scientific developments by using those traditional art tools: pens and brushes. I used pen and brush to draw imaginative genetic mutations, transformations, and metamorphoses. For the students, I created similar projects using those same traditional tools.
It was the social upheavals that convulsed American society in the 1960s that forced me to start thinking about looking for more appropriate tools. In the late 1960s in Chicago there was widespread protest against the Vietnam War. I and many other artists and students wanted to use our particular talents to support those protests. As a consequence, we suddenly needed the capacity to communicate quickly and dramatically with the public that we were trying to influence. We turned towards more modern tools. At the same time, The School of the Art Institute began to move in a similar direction. In the brief period of five years in the late 1960s the School of the Art Institute of Chicago set up classes in photography, film and video.
I set up a somewhat different program. With the assistance of the Advance Screen Company in Chicago I created a photo screening area that led me almost immediately to other commercial imaging systems such as the 3M Thermo-Fax. This made it possible for us to get images out to the public within a day. All of this made us more effective politically, but at the same time prompted us to think more deeply about the nature of art, of the artist's tools, and of the teaching of art. I was struck by the paradox that the art world appeared to be ever more commercially oriented -the gallery system dominated much of art- yet, on the other hand, it did not recognize art made with commercial tools as genuine, serious art.
Artists were wary; they did not wish to be swept up in a new technology at the expense of the "art", and therefore many opposed vigorously using for art purposes new communication tools designed for business use. They wanted industrial tools to be confined to industrial art schools. These concerns were not necessarily the fears of artistic Luddites; the instincts of the skeptics were often sound to the extent that, if used in the way they were designed to be used, the new tools offered little more than a highly constrained and mechanical art. But what could be done if they were used in ways for which they were not designed? I saw the need for a new area of study in which questions about the ways in which the kind of tools we use -manual, mechanical, electronic, photronic, etc.- determine our perceptions and how we record them. An approach to art education was required that would place tools in their proper place as an adjunct of the human mind and senses. It was also essential that such an approach build into its structure acceptance of change. This was one of the ways in which our thinking and our program anticipated the information age. It is in this context that Generative Systems emerged as a viable educational direction.
It is easy to see in retrospect how I was led to Generative Systems, but it was not so clear at the time. Generative Systems did not suddenly emerge in full bloom. It began in an empty closet-sized room without official sanction in 1969. In 1970 it became a regular course of study listed in the school catalogue as Energy Bank. Originally it was to be called "Reproduction Systems" since we had acquired from the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company the world's first color copier, the 3M Color-In-Color. Almost every image coming out of the machine however, was an original and I was not interested in reproduction, so the term Energy Bank was used. When the students took more energy out of the bank than they put in, the name was changed, fortuitously, to Generative Systems. At the time we had no knowledge that there had been a long history of Generative Systems dating back to the Greeks. Nor did we anticipate that in thirty years Generative Art would become a major field.
We were truly an energy center. Since we used the Color-in-Color machine in practically every conceivable way except for simple reproduction, it was necessary to know the machine inside and outside. Through studying its mechanics and its underlying principles, we soon began to understand energy in a new way. New to us were the energies of electrostatics, magnetics, and heat that were the basic components of the machine. When we soon after acquired a Telecopier (Fax), which used light, heat and sound as imaging devices we were able to add the dimension of imaging by sound to our energy repertoire.
The second year, much to our anguish, the color machine was removed, but this was eventually fortunate for our future for I was forced to think about Generative Systems without the excitement and work of electronic imaging. I was being asked where the art was in all this energy? How did the new rapid imaging and transmission equipment affect our thinking as artists? Instead of backing away from the technology when the color machine was returned the following year, I created a new course, Process I, followed the next semester by Process II. Process I allowed the students to experiment freely, without machines, with electrostatics, magnetics, heat, sound and transmission without respect to art. Process II gave the students access to the electronic equipment for experimental purposes. Finally, I created a course I called Homography, in which students used any and all of manual, mechanical, electronic, photronic, sound and biological means of imaging; Ultimately Homography became a course in the visualization of time through these various means. A major breakthrough came when John Dunn, teaching assistant, built a Zenith Z2D computer to add to the Radio Shack 8K computer that we acquired in 1975. It was during this period that John Dunn began his path toward the development of pioneer computer graphic systems for the PC that would lead to his founding of Time Arts in Glenn Ellen, California. After graduating, John Dunn continued to bring his new discoveries back to Generative Systems. This long desired acquisition of computers took us into the next technological stage.
With the creation of a computer course and courses in Generative Air, and Performance, Generative Systems offered a full-time art program, including graduate study. The philosophy and practice of the program had evolved and matured into the forms that would characterize Generative Systems for the next decade. It was an enormously dynamic and productive program, but others in the art school often misunderstood it. For example, because we used copy machines, we were labeled as "copier artists". Yet not only were copy machines only one of many tools that we used, but in fact we rarely used them to copy, to make exact reproductions. Rather, we used the principles upon which copy machines were based to create original images. Similarly, we used fax machines, but we rarely sent ordinary messages by fax. Instead, we used the sound transmission, which is at the heart of fax technology to create sound-based images. Eventually, the study of sound became an important element of the program, exemplified by the work of Lief Brush, who still works with sound at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.
It is understandable that outsiders should try to label us by our tool technology. That, after all, was traditionally the way to identify art areas: oil painting, water colors, lithography, and so on. Yet in fact we never labeled our courses in that way, because the specific tools involved were only incidental. That is how we could have one student building a computer, another developing 3D photography, a third working with sound transmission, a fourth manipulating heat sensitive papers, and so on. The true identifying feature of Generative Systems was an attitude, an approach to the world in general and to art in particular. It was an attitude that rejected the notion of art boundaries, the idea that some subjects and techniques were appropriate for art and some were not. In our philosophy, the world and all its tools were fair game for subject or object.
The Generative Systems attitude was extremely sensitive to and receptive to change, to continual and dynamic change in the interrelationships among technology, social conditions, and art. That attitude, of course, was particularly appropriate at a time when technological change was accelerating. But while we acknowledged and welcomed change, we did not reject traditional art, despite the accusations of our skeptics. We always saw ourselves as building on the past, not overthrowing it. We did, however, oppose the traditional mode of teaching art, and we sought to create a new system of art education that emphasized process and transformation, society and technological change; we wanted to bring the modern world into the ivory tower.
The philosophy of Generative Systems would have led to nothing without enormously talented teachers and students to implement it A number of well-known artists also lent their talents to the program. In a program that used industrial tools, we found natural allies in industry, especially industries with an imaging component in their products. The 3M Corporation was particularly helpful, not only in providing imaging tools, but in allowing 3M scientists to advise us and help in other ways. Dr. Douglas Dybvig and Don Conlin, in particular, repeatedly aided the Generative Systems program generally and me specifically. They participated in major exhibitions with Generative Systems artists, and they made it possible for me to work in 3M Color Research and Central Research Laboratories.
Scientists of the Apeco Corporation -a company that was developing a wet electrostatic color copier- also rendered us great assistance. Rudy Guzik, whom I mentioned above, was a physicist at Apeco. Robert Gundlach, of the Xerox Corporation, lectured for us, and helped with advice. Gundlach's son, Greg, subsequently joined our program as a student, and began the work on 3D photography for which he later acquired three patents. The support of industry was helpful not only directly by providing us aid and equipment, but also because it exemplified the multilateral relationships that we thought necessary in the new art activity we were developing. Industry was where the action was in terms of technological advances, and that was where we wanted to be.
The energetic and talented artists who contributed to the development of Generative systems came from the United States, Canada, India, Mexico, Argentina, France, Spain and several other countries. Marisa Gonzalez would prove to be the most dynamic of the European group.
When Marisa Gonzalez first walked into Generative Systems in 1971 she was bursting with ideas she wanted to express. The bubbling cauldron of activity, curiosity and experimentation occurring in the Generative Systems lab was an ideal environment for Marisa's search for a congenial means of expression. At first she worked with the "software" (the imaging papers and photo-receptive rolls) of the 3M Color-In-Color. Using little cutouts of men she burned and imaged sheet after sheet trying out every possible visual combination of effects without using the machine. In this way she was able to create a rapid metamorphosis of images. Marisa had a methodical way of working to get just the effect that she wanted. In a carefully systematic way Marisa gradually, through the years, adopted various new imaging systems. At all times she used the technology for her personal reflections. The technology did not control her; she controlled it.
When Marisa Gonzalez first walked into Generative Systems in 1971 she was bursting with ideas she wanted to express. The bubbling cauldron of activity, curiosity and experimentation occurring in the Generative Systems lab was an ideal environment for Marisa's search for a congenial means of expression. At first she worked with the "software" (the imaging papers and photo-receptive rolls) of the 3M Color-In-Color. Using little cutouts of men she burned and imaged sheet after sheet trying out every possible visual combination of effects without using the machine. In this way she was able to create a rapid metamorphosis of images. Marisa had a methodical way of working to get just the effect that she wanted. In a carefully systematic way Marisa gradually, through the years, adopted various new imaging systems. At all times she used the technology for her personal reflections. The technology did not control her; she controlled it.
With each new technology Marisa composed images as she might compose music in a most personal and intuitive way. I always assumed that her background in music helped her to understand that one note belonged to other notes. So one image in the process of becoming was part of a series of images making up one composition. She did not place one image on top of another until the final result was satisfying, rather she let the series of images make up the whole as each image emerged from the other. This was a generative system. The rapid possibility for metamorphosing made possible by electronic technology was accepted immediately by Marisa even when she used only the by-products (then called software) of the technology. A generative system was totally compatible with her perceptions of image making.
As the technology evolved so did Marisa for she understood the importance of generative systems as time based systems. As new software and hardware were being developed in the United States she returned periodically to keep abreast of the developments. One of these visits was to the Making Waves exhibition in the Chicago area in the 1980s. There she joined me, John Dunn, Dr. Douglas Dybvig and others in our demonstrations. By the mid 1980s she acquired a Time Arts computer graphic system that she is still using to this day. Thus she added to her earlier bank of technology i.e., painting and photography, the technologies of copier, fax, computer and its peripherals. In this manner her artistic growth developed along with the technology. During recent decades she has acquired technology that makes it possible for her to share her insights not only with museum visitors, but also globally on the Internet. Thus, by moving in time with the technology, while retaining the sensibility of the artist, Marisa has been able to expand her communication capacity. In her earlier work she revealed the metamorphosis of objects; now she reveals the metamorphosis of an industry in a changing town. This latest exhibition, showing the destruction of an old bread factory and the recreation of a new landscape in its place, is a further example of metamorphosis. But now that change is on a larger social scale. Just as Marisa broke the old Spanish wall of Tapies' painting with organic growth so she goes on to break down the hard factory wall into a landscape. This is a continuation, in time, of a process Marisa has been pursuing for thirty odd years.
So the time based systems have been for Marisa ideal tools by which to share her most private perceptions of change. Marisa truly understood that Generative Systems is an attitude, an outlook compatible with the new idea of science, of genetic and space discoveries. She understood that new tools were needed for new times. She knew that the visualization of time is a concept for her time, that it would project her art into the new century. She also saw the interconnectedness of generations. She sensed that she flowed from other artists as other artists would flow from her. She never thought of a generative system as anything other than generation to generation evolution. It is this conception of Generative Systems as an evolutionary system that, so many years ago, she took back to her homeland, Spain.
Marisa continually strove to keep the interaction of Generative Systems between the United States and Europe constantly alive. She organized and participated in exhibitions, workshops and lectures. In this way she kept informed of new developments in technology and brought those developments to Spain. In 1983 Marisa joined me along with Stan Vanderbeek, Greg Gundlach and other artists during my exhibition in Electra at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In 1986 Marisa organized and helped me keep running a Sonia Sheridan exhibit at Processos in the Reine Sofia Museum. She wrote an essay on electrographics for the Processos catalogue. To this exhibition I brought a Time Arts computer graphic system, Lumena, created by John Dunn. It was there that Marisa made her first computer graphics. In 1986 Marisa again invited me, along with John Dunn and Jamy Sheridan, to the Circulo Des Belles Artes where we all four gave lessons, lectures, visual and sound exhibitions of our work. These are just a few of the exchanges we had through the years with Marisa. Meanwhile in Spain and other parts of Europe Marisa generously shared information about Generative Systems with other artists and institutions for which she was often not recognized.
In sum, Marisa has been a major force in introducing and spreading the ideas of Generative Systems to Europe. As an index of her success, a quick search on the Internet will bring up a great number of European listings on genetic art and genetic systems. Around the globe there have been generative art conferences and exhibitions. Most recently a major conference of the International Society of Electronic Arts had a section Generative Art as Evolutionary art. Marisa has been a part of this current. A strong, unique Spanish artist, Marisa Gonzalez has carried on tradition while creating the new in a most generative way. Friday, May 05, 2000.

Sheridan Landy, Sonia: Professor Emerita, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1961-80; Founder, Generative Systems Program, Art Institute of Chicago, 1970; Honorary Editor, Leonardo: International Journal of Art Science Technology, at present. Guggenheim Fellow, 1973; National Endowment for the Arts, 1974, 1976, 1981.

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