First, I'd like to say that I wasn't able to open most of the documents in the file, as my beloved PC didn't have the programs to read them, and I don't have the money to buy those programs right now. So I'm going to write about one of the artists on the tiny file I was able to read. (Don't be talking mess, I love my laptop, and can't afford a new one, so don't give me sass or condescension.)
Muriel Cooper, born in 1925, is known as being one of the very first graphic designers to ever have applied her skill in a digital setting: after graduating from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1952, she quickly joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, yo), designing things for the MIT Press such as "Learning from Las Vegas" by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, and "File Under Architecture" by Herbert Muschamp. Bear in mind, this was all done non-digitally, as computerized Graphic Design was not yet a thing. At the same time, she was also granted the position of Art Director of the MIT Press, a special position created specifically for her.
However, all of that changed in 1967, at a special summer conference/course taught by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, taught by someone I don't know about named Negroponte. At that point, she learned about data-coding for computers. "I nearly died," Cooper said. "We were in this big room with these teletype machines doing Fortran and there was nothing visual about anything. You had to translate any idea you had into this highly codified symbolic language that didn't make any goddamned sense to me, and I was crazy." However frustrating and bewildering that course, Cooper came out of it with "a conviction, naïve as it could be, that there lay in computers the possibility of a huge amount of flexibility that the publishing procedure did not have. It was very clear to me that there was a huge potential." She had a feeling that technology was the direction that the world was headed, and lo and behold, five years later she created the Visual Language Workshop.
The Visual Language Workshop was created in order to inform and encourage students vis-a-vis using computerized methods to create understandable media that looked exactly like one was using traditional methods. Through the 70s and 80s, she kept the Visual Language Workshop running, encouraging designers to experiment with this new technological universe, and kept it going until she died in 1994. Throughout this time, she never truly learned how to code, and she was not even mathematically minded. However,
Muriel Cooper, to me, is inspiration in another way: she is a beacon of feminism. She was the only female tenured professor at her lab, famous for dressing totally acromatically, she commanded an iron respect. She was famous for her strength of character, and refusal to be cowed by anyone. "Whoever she saw, a CEO or whoever, she'd do this 'feet on the desk' thing," recalled John Maeda, the designer who succeeded her at the MIT Media Lab. "In Muriel's era, men were tough, and she said, I'll be tougher, so she showed them by putting her feet on the desk." He means this literally: she would rest her feet atop her desk in a calculated gesture of leisure, irreverence, and superiority. Negroponte remembers her describing the redoubtable New York plutocrat Avery Fisher "as a 'fat cat' to his face."
Muriel don't take shit from nobody.
