The first thing you think about when it comes to April Greiman is technology. A woman in command of all the digital tools of the moment, inventively putting information through the electronic sieve: filtering, distorting, layering, manipulating, until she arrives at a sufficiently dense mesh of imagery to let it stand.
What’s less obvious—though it makes perfect sense once the surprise has worn off—is the other side of this pilot-ess of the multimedia mission control: her earthiness, and strong sense of connection to nature and the more mystical aspects of science. “How Californian,” I hear you say to yourself. Well, yes. But Los Angeles does that to a person. It’s a dreamy kind of place, sultry as well as a touch sinister, and being right out there at the edge of the continent between the ocean and the desert gives it a special charge. (Dreams, we’ll come back to dreams...) It’s hard to imagine her work blossoming quite the way it has if she was based, say, in New York, where the sky comes presliced into streetwide strips.
Greiman isn’t a native Californian but by now has effectively earned that status. Asked where else she might live, she responds with genuine incredulity: “I have no idea.” Having worked at the Museum of Modern Art, on the Taxi Project, curated by Emilio Ambasz in 1976, she found herself “fed up with New York and pretty sick of MoMA and the politics.” Looking around the city for other work, nothing grabbed her interest. “It was all packaging, corporate identity, signage, and I didn’t want to specialise.”
Her move to LA in 1976 was “accidental”—she came out to visit friends and got hooked on the Southern California landscape. The relocation enabled her to develop her own blend of work outside of the categories by which US graphic design was then recognised; desktop computer technologies were just about to enter the market, and Greiman was among the first to recognize their potential for the integration of different media.
“When I came here in the late seventies it was really a cow town, unexplored territory. The bad thing about LA was that it had no tradition. The good thing about LA was also that it had no tradition.” She acknowledges the presence of the hi-tech and entertainment industries as important background influences, although she is scathing about the latter. “It’s a sleazy industry. They steal your ideas, work you to death, don’t keep agreements, and don’t return your calls,” she says with the tone of someone once bitten, twice shy; thus far, she hasn’t done so much as an album cover. But there were definite advantages to being in Tinsel Town.
Everyone who comes to LA notices the curious quality of the light: often smog-filtered and restive, but sometimes (especially after rainfall) possessed of a hallucinogenic clarity. The vibrancy of LA’s visual spectrum had an immediate impact on Greiman’s early New Wave work. “There were three color palettes that really bowled me over when I got to LA: the Asian, that is, the look of Little Tokyo; the Latino/Hispanic, with its pink, turquoise, and intense yellow; and the desert, with its very subtle colors. The desert palette really turned me around.”
LA’s proximity to the desert—Joshua Tree only two and a half hours’ drive east, the great expanses of Death Valley and Arizona a day’s drive away—has been a very significant influence on her work, in terms of tonality, the use of texture gradients to suggest depth on a two-dimensional surface, and the wide vista.
“The desert is so mind-blowing in terms of scale,” Greiman declares. “It’s just you and your electrons, you being part of the universe again. When you’re at your workstation, you are the world. You’re tied to your box in your corner, in three square feet. Whereas in Death Valley, or Monument Valley, you’re like . . . a speck.” Then there’s the silence, in contrast to the necessary hubbub of the office, “where there’s lots of energy and lots of other bodies around. The desert is one of the few places I’ve found I’m comfortable being by myself, simply reading, drawing, sleeping, or driving around.” Nonetheless, since meeting architect Michael Rotondi—her Significant Other for the last few years—Greiman has gone on many such forays à deux. “It seems we’ve spent a lot of our creative juices being out there shooting things.”
An early adopter of new technologies, Greiman was quick to recognise the potential of the Kodak stretch camera (as its disposable panoramic was originally known) to capture what she calls “the big view,” and use its elongated proportions to harness the grandeur of natural landscape. The menus for Nicola restaurant in downtown LA (a recent project in collaboration with Rotondi) feature gorgeous panoramic shots of a garden, the ocean, and Death Valley’s luminous ochre soil.
Vastness versus the confined four corners of the screen: the issue of mutable scale runs through the body of Greiman’s work. Her portfolio runs from business cards to billboard-size images. In the giant-size posters for the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), the promotional poster for Pike’s Peak large-sheet printers (measuring 44" by 65", but bearing its gleeful promise: soon to be 54 1/2" by 77"!), the 80-foot-long billboard for theGraphic Design in America exhibition, and the life-size, not-quite-centerfold nude self-portrait for the Walker Art Center’s Design Quarterly (treated as a single concertina sheet, 6 feet in length, instead of the usual stitched magazine), we see her reaching for the physicality of actual dimension, perhaps in response to the infinite choice of scale offered by the Macintosh computer.
Using the Mac’s thumbnail command, a whole design layout can be shown in miniature for appraisal (a scale at which text is reduced to illegible shaded blocks), and yet the same image can be progressively enlarged until not just the individual letters, but even the bitmapped fragments of which they are composed can be blown up to display their own discrete essence. Greiman’s interest in fractal geometry is not surprising, given her daily exposure to such exponential shifts. “In fractal theory, the more deeply you go into a subject, the more the part indicates the whole, and likewise, from the most finite element, you can project out the whole. The pixel is like the DNA of the electronic world.”
Surveying her work, one can’t help observing a likeness between the graphic pixel and the individual stitch of a Navajo rug, that unit of measure which builds in ziggurat formation to create larger patterns, wholes out of integers. It is strange to look at an electronically reproduced image, and see in it the vestiges of something so handmade, so textile, but the parallel is unmistakable. And not inappropriate. Greiman has had a long-standing interest in the arts and culture of the Native Americans. “[Carl] Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections is what first got me into indigenous culture, and to understanding the American Indian approach of thinking with your heart.” In her most recently completed work, collaborating with architect Barton Myers on the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, in California, the patterns she has devised for the roof tiles and various interior surfaces are like escapees from the screen, dancing under the changing light, shimmering warp and weft.
Asked what have been the principal developments in her work since the publication of Hybrid Imagery in 1990, she points to the changes that have occurred with graphics technology. “Six years ago, we used to go out and rent the equipment to complete the process at the level I was used to”—Quantel Paintboxes and other exorbitant gadgets, running $500 to $700 per hour for rental. “Now it’s here on my desk. Traditionally, the way you proceed in graphic design is very linear: you make your sketches, take your photos, set out your type. With video, sound, and motion, the whole process is much more fluid. It has its own architecture. You watch it build in front of you. Very often I’ll see an image that implies space, three dimensionally, and I’ll just take a ‘snapshot,’” using the command of that name on the Mac. “This process really breaks down categories. It really allows us to shift paradigms. The creative process isn’t controlled from the top down like television.”
Greiman’s aptitude for technology is probably something that runs in the family: it turns out that her father, John, has been in the computer sciences for forty years, and she describes her only sibling, fondly, as “a genius.” Trained as an accountant, her father was an early computer programmer who set up the first mini-computers for Technicolor and Warner Brothers. Meanwhile, her brother, Paul, is a leading meteorologist, working for the government “diagramming out the universe,” as she puts it. A child prodigy, he had already published learned papers at the age of ten. “As a child, I remember we had every kind of weather forecasting equipment on the roof.”
The last few years have been marked not just by technological but also personal change. Greiman’s relationship with Rotondi has been a catalyst for new areas of work, providing an opportunity to expand into literal (as opposed to illusory) three dimensions. Formerly one of the partners in the celebrated LA architecture practice Morphosis, Rotondi went solo and set up under his own name around the time he and Greiman met. As Director of SCI-Arc, he is ringmaster of LA’s most vivacious and helter-skelter architecture school. Greiman’s designs for SCI-Arc literature, including bulletins and program announcements, have given the school a graphic identity congruent with its radical reputation. Her latest project, a school brochure, features a hole punched right through its thirty-two pages, a graphic confirmation of the center-spread statement that “Architecture can punch a hole in your sky.”
Lately, she has found herself reading a lot about the overlap between science and spirituality; hitherto, growing up in a science-oriented household had made her “stay away from all that.” She and Rotondi share an interest in Taoism and Zen Buddhism, and they’re more apt to launch into a conversation about chaos theory, psychology, or neurobiology than about the latest activities of fellow designers. Operating from adjacent buildings in downtown LA, connected by a catwalk, they feed each other ideas, and increasingly work together in a way that’s reminiscent of that earlier LA partnership of Charles and Ray Eames.
“Once a day, one of us goes back and forth between the buildings. It’s more of a spiritual collaboration. We have a conceptual compatibility. It’s not like we sit down in a meeting. On Nicola, I was in from the beginning, picking the color palette and materials” she says, describing her role in designing the new restaurant for Larry Nicola in the Sanwa Bank Building in downtown LA, for which Rotondi is the architect. “It was obvious that one day I’d get involved in three dimensions, because I’ve always treated the page as a three-dimensional space.”
So it’s appropriate that Greiman is now getting commissioned to undertake multimedia projects. She’s just beginning work on designing the interface for interactive CD-ROMs being produced by a Honolulu-based company for NASA and the Smithsonian Institution. Though the project is at an early stage, she reveals that one of the titles will be created by the digital artist Tom Van Sant, and is “a bit like the Eames’s Powers of Ten,” allowing the user to zoom in to different aerial views of the earth.
Greiman is unimpressed by the majority of current multimedia titles. “The people who are putting them together tend to be from engineering. They’re mostly coming out from nerds who know nothing about typography. People are treating the multimedia interface like pages,” she says, exasperatedly, “instead of trying to get 3D and motion, more like a movie.”
Commissioned to produce five- or ten-second station-identification spots for Lifetime, the New York cable television station, Greiman demonstrated her commitment to using lowend equipment so as to extract the maximum creative potential from minimum funds. “We took the pitiful budget and instead of spending it on postproduction, we used an 8 mm handicam, shot on my shoulder, and Kodak disposable cameras.” The cheap color prints were scanned into the computer, and manipulated via various Mac programs. One of the most beautiful spots, entitled Yucca after the native plant, dances before your eyes: a pan of the landscape, slightly out of focus, shot from a moving car, swirls before the viewer, in the blazing greens and blues of desert foliage and mountains. Meanwhile, in the center of the screen, within a separate box (containing the channel’s initial L), a sequence of rock formations glides counterclockwise, in bright orange, at a stately pace. The whirling blue of the main picture— objects etched against the sky, yet as if seen through a petroleum jelly haze—has exactly that combination of chromatic lucidity and inspired narrative lunacy that normally occurs in the private screening room of one’s subconscious.
Greiman’s inner life may be even more fecund than the images she brings into tangible existence. For fifteen years she has been recording her dream diary in notebooks. “I’ve got a closetful of books, notations of dreams, epic dreams. I’ve been a Jungian since art school,” she confesses, hesitating a little to talk in detail about dreams and spirituality because “it’s too spooky. People confuse it with religion.” Yet she takes them seriously. For many years she met once a week to narrate her dreams to a woman who had trained at the Jung Institute, who helped her to interpret their symbolism and the mythic significance of colors.
When Greiman reveals this, you begin to understand the fluid assembly of image types that characterise her posters, the runic presences that people her compositions, the virtual depth of the graphic plane, and the aleatory drift of texture and typography that typify her best work.
Think, then, of her posters as photographs of a slow-moving cloud formation, momentary snapshots of the shifting contents of her mind. Often in her work (especially in the SCI-Arc material), it’s as if the words are streaming by, written in evanescent script like the vapor trail of an aircraft, briefly depositing their message before deliquescing into a solid background of the same color or evaporating altogether. Then again, maybe they’re smoke rising in the wilderness above a desert campfire (a Coleman stove at Zabriskie Point, Death Valley—one of her annual rituals), concentrated and legible in origin, then magically dissipating into the vastness of the atmosphere.