April Greiman and Digital Design

Not long ago another blogger mentioned an American designer named April Greiman. As is often the case, the name was not familiar but a quick Internet search turned up quite a lot about her and her career. Ms. Greiman is listed as a designer rather than an artist, but she is also considered one of the early links between analog art--painting, sculpture, drawing--and the digital world we live in now.

Her seminal work is reproduced to the left, and in today's digital graphics world isn't too remarkable. But in 1986 when it was done it was a revolution. The image was produced on a Macintosh computer of the time, incorporating a nude woman (the designer herself) with symbolic images and text. Today this sort of image is quite common, but thirty years ago it was startling. Moreover Ms. Greiman actually did something more than make a revolutionary digital graphic. She actually made this image enormous and bound into an issue of a magazine called Design Quarterly. The design was published by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The magazine folded out to almost three-by-six feet--the poster unfolded three times across, nine times down. The figure is therefore life-size. The ground-breaking aspect of this particular piece is widely acknowledged today--it's even taught in design schools.

Ms. Greiman called the piece crazy, being a magazine that is also a poster and therefore completely different thing. She even speculated that perhaps someone will make sense of it. Perhaps today we can look at the image and poster and magazine differently. Consider that the new (the design) is printed in an old way but it is also deeply folded so that the only way to see an original is to unfold the multiple layers, seeking the inner vision--a metaphor for thought itself. Another idea is that this particular piece is a foretaste of our own digitally-saturated free for all society, emerging from the tightly bound past as a metaphor for how human creativity is morphing and changing so much during our era. A final thought--this piece might even be considered a kind of conceptual art, an evocation of the very strange (for the times) idea of digital art.

Some have said that this piece actually is not creation at all. Instead it is simply a compilation of images, laid down in digital format--a digital paste-up. But I would argue as have others that this is a visible step in the human evolution of art.