Sonia Landy Sheridan — Generative Systems program at SAIC

1970

Artists: Sonia Landy Sheridan · Year: 1970 · Medium: Pedagogical program and artistic practice — xerographic art, early digital imaging, generative systems thinking · Substrate: 3M's Color-in-Color xerographic machines; early computer-graphics workstations; pedagogical curriculum connecting copying technology to generative principles · Place: Chicago, Illinois, USA · Institution: School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) Sonia Sheridan founded the Generative Systems program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1970. The program treated new reproduction and communication technologies — xerography first, then computer imaging as it became available — as art-making tools and taught generations of students to work across the full spectrum of available technologies. Sheridan was, in the early 1970s, one of the very few women teaching at a major American art institution on the subject of technology in art, and her program was one of the first dedicated curricula in what would later be called new-media art. Sheridan was early enough in xerographic art that she partnered directly with 3M Corporation, which gave her access to prototype and pre-release machines. Her 3M partnership was unusual — a major corporate relationship with an artist for the purpose of exploring the artistic potential of the company's products — and the resulting work is one of the cleanest American cases of corporate-artist collaboration in the field. Generative Systems ran at SAIC until 1980. Sheridan continued teaching and working afterward at the Polaroid Foundation and independently. Her archive is held at SAIC and at the Daniel Langlois Foundation. Her program's graduates include Joan Truckenbrod (covered separately), who continued Generative Systems' approach after Sheridan's retirement. Lore Sonia Landy Sheridan's 3M partnership was part of the company's deliberate outreach to artists in the late 1960s, in which 3M loaned its experimental Color-in-Color copier (an early color photocopying device) to selected artists for unrestricted creative use. Sheridan was a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and convinced her department to host the equipment in a dedicated studio she founded called Generative Systems — believed to be the first formally-named "generative art" academic program in the United States. Sheridan's husband Wesley Sheridan was a computer programmer at IIT Research Institute who collaborated on several of her early electronic-image projects. The Generative Systems studio at SAIC operated from 1970 through 1980 and trained dozens of subsequent artists. Sources • Sheridan, Sonia Landy — essays in Leonardo (various) • SAIC — Generative Systems program archive • Daniel Langlois Foundation — Sheridan collection