The magic of using machines to build images

I started using machines to create muy art work in 1971, when I arrived from Madrid to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and enter to the Generative Systems Department created in 1970 by the artist and resercher Sonia Sheridan. I discovered all the potentials that machines offered us to generate images.

The use of the first 3M Color Copier just invented was magic. The possibility to work directly on the screen with the objects: to unify the three dimensions in two, to build the composition directly on the glass, moving and performing while the machine was processing the image. We were painting mainly with the light of the machine, through our movement, through our body, through ourselves ,

In my working process, I use objects and images as an autobiographical reference, as a metaphor, as a symbol. In my iconography has been implicit the psychological aspects of feminism in an imbrication between esthetic technique and concept.

I use this technology overlapping two ways as a tool to process instantaneous reproduction creating secuences, and as a language to conform my personal concept to develop and integrate it in the language of the machine in a simbiosis of both. intervening in the process time, space and motion.

The work that came from the copier was considered “just a photocopy” without any commercial connotation. Women were not worried in positioning her work commercially oriented, we felt absolutely free doing our research.

Madrid, 18 / 11/ 2021

Marisa González