IN 1986 APRIL GREIMAN POWERFULLY DEMONSTRATED TO A DOUBTFUL EAST COAST GRAPHIC DESIGN ESTABLISHMENT THAT COMPUTERS WERE INDEED VALUABLE TOOLS. When asked to author an issue of Design Quarterly, she used the provided honorarium to buy MacVision, a combination of software and hardware that allowed her to import still images from a video camera. Using MacVision and a dot-matrix printer, Greiman painstakingly composited the issue.1 Rather than a traditional retrospective, the resulting magazine folded out into a life-size poster of Greiman’s nude body layered with imagery and text. The dense poster traces a personal history of technology while questioning the boundaries between art and design.

Never quelled by computation, Greiman bought her first Macintosh in 1984 after hearing a lecture by Alan Kay at the inaugural TED conference.2 The influence of her technological daring cannot be ignored, but she is more than a technophile. A student of Wolfgang Weingart, Greiman is a key figure in the introduction of New Wave style to the United States. Her expressive hybrid designs splice digital with physical to probe universals of the human condition. Before networked culture permeated our lives, Greiman used budding technology to connect us through color, symbology, and mythology.

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DOES IT MAKE SENSE?

APRIL GREIMAN | 1986

So I’m walking through the English Garden with Andreas—and I mention the idea (duality) of order and chaos. So, he tips me off to the latest philosophical twist—chaos is simply a man/mind-made invention that frankly doesn’t exist! I think about this and I say…yea, come to think about it, in seeing a computer model of fractal geometry, things that appear without structures, such as clouds and mountains, are in fact orderly processes. While on the surface, things seem irregular and chaotic, when you break down the parts, in reality they are more and more modular and ordered. The more finitely we perceive them, the more their inherent order becomes apparent.

1 April Greiman, “Think About What You Think About” (lecture, San Jose State University, February 7, 2012), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek5mu1wY8c0.

2 April Greiman, interview by Josh Smith, idsgn, September 11, 2009, http://idsgn.org/posts/design-discussions-april-greiman-on-trans-media/.