The Art of Lucia Grossberger Morales
By Angela Romeo
Lucia Grossberger Morales is more than the sum of her talented parts. She has taken art, passion and technology to interesting heights. She will be at DESERT WRITERS EXPO: Meet the Authors, on February 15, 2020 from 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM, Rancho Mirage Library Community Room. This event is presented by the Palm Springs Writers Guild in collaboration with the Rancho Mirage Library.
This yearly event features authors discussing the business of writing and other topics related to writing, publishing and marketing. The participating authors will sell and sign their books. While all genres will be represented, Lucia will be bring her own take on publishing.
She will be exhibiting her enhanced iBook Weaving Art with Computers. The book is available for free at the Apple Bookstore.
Lucia is an artist whose work deals with cross-cultural issues and the experience of being an immigrant and a woman. She has successfully brought the artist and Latina experience to light by use of artistic passionate technology.
“This book is important to me because it is about my experience as an artist and woman at a time when technology was the purview of men,” noted Lucia. “The book shows how I work with information. I have an MS in Instructional Design from USC. I received my degree in 1976, before there was a computer. I taught Reading in Junior High and High School. There I saw first-hand the way students process information, visually, aurally, tactically. When I got the computer, I embraced the way one can combine images, words, links. The computer was the tool I needed to combine media to tell my story.”
“Starting in 1986, I worked with CD-ROMs using Macromedia Director to weave together stories. In 1992 when the web was just starting, I was creating rich media environments that wouldn’t be available on the internet till at least 10 years later. CD-ROMs were in a sense the harbinger of the Internet. My iBooks are a new way of creating media that resembles CD-ROMs but now they are accessible to a wider audience.”
“I have been searching for how to describe an iBook. I found the answer in the definition of Electronic literature or digital literature. The definition reads ‘Electronic Literature is a genre of encompassing works created exclusively on and for digital devices, such as computers, tablets and mobile phones.’ It further defines a work of electronic literature as ‘a construction whose literary aesthetics emerge from computation…work that could only exist in the space for which it was developed/written/coded—the digital space.’
“This means that these writings cannot be easily printed, or cannot be printed at all, because elements crucial to the text are unable to be carried over onto a printed version. Much of my work is not transferable to traditional medium because it is created in a virtual world.”
“I have been involved in this field for many years. I purchased my first Apple II computer in 1979. I had no computer knowledge or experience. But I was determined that she would find a way to make art on the Apple II computer. I traded traditional canvases and brushes for data, pixels, algorithms, central processing units, binary language, and high-speed microcircuits. In 1981, I coauthored The Designer’s Tool Kit, which Apple published in 1982.”
Since that time, Lucia has pioneered the digital art realm. Her early work on the CD-ROM, Sangre Boliviana, explored her relationship with Bolivia and being an immigrant. Sangre Boliviana was selected by the National Library in Paris in 2013 as an example of CD-ROMs as an art form paving the way for other digital and internet works. Her Apple II work is archived at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. In addition, the Palm Springs Artist Council selected her videos for the Artist Council Exhibition in 2014 and 2015. She continues to expand her projects to include performance and installations while continuing to work at the forefront of female artists working with technology.
As Lucia continues to experiment with digital media, as an art form and as social commentary, she continues to open the technology door for women and others who have felt disenfranchised
For more information on Lucia Grossberger Morales visit lucia@luciagrossbergermorales.com, cyber-chica.com and huge-pixels.com. For more information on the DESERT WRITERS EXPO: Meet the Authors, on February 15, 2020, visit https://palmspringswritersguild.org.
