Casemore Gallery presents an exhibition of works on paper by Sonya Rapoport (1923-2015), recognized as a pioneer of computer art. The exhibition explores the evolution of her engagement with the computer, from her earliest drawings on printout paper in the late 1970s, through her computer-mediated “audience participation performances” in the 1980s.
Rapoport–whose work is currently on view in the exhibition Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982 at Los Angeles County Museum of Art–began using the computer in 1976, when she found discarded continuous-feed computer printout paper in a bin in the basement of the UC Berkeley mathematics building. Drawn to the futuristic aesthetic of sprocket holes, grid lines, and carbon-black, dot-matrix printed code, she drew into the existing patterns with graphite, colored pencil, and ink stamps, and stitched the construction together with colorful yarn to create drawings such as Right-On (1976).
In 1977 Rapoport wrote, “my work is an aesthetic response triggered by scientific data. The format is computer print-out, a ritualistic symbol of our technological society.”
By the early 1980s, Rapoport had learned to code and was using the computer to analyze and visualize data. At a time when computers were primarily used for business, science, and military applications, Rapoport was gathering and processing data about what she called “soft material,” including her biorhythms, her shoe collection, her home, and the objects on her dresser, an approach she characterized as a feminist use of new technology.
In A 20th Century Portrait (Unknown) (1979), part of Rapoport’s Objects On my Dresser series, she represents her subject as a multidimensional “netweb” plot, perhaps referring to the analytical, quantitative perceptions of the computer. But behind this enigmatic image is a social interaction where Rapoport discussed the objects on her dresser with an unknown subject – an idiosyncratic personality test of sorts. The related large-scale drawing Surface (1981) features photocopied images and appropriated text on computer paper that reveals the complex, interconnected psychological relationships that Rapoport had with the objects on her dresser.