“The Secretary”. Labor and Automation in Sonia Landy Sheridan’s Generative Systems Curriculum
Abstracts
Projects: Sonia Landy Sheridan and Keith Smith, an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, in 1974, represented the most ambitious work to emerge from Sheridan’s Generative Systems program. As Sheridan stated, the goal of Generative Systems, an academic program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago was “the generation of ideas with the aid of current technology.” The work Sheridan and Smith displayed at the Museum of Modern Art, the product of a collaboration with the 3M corporation’s Color-in-Color photocopy machine, not only displayed the creative potential of machine-assisted image production but also revealed a fundamental truth about the postindustrial economy: the increasing precarity of human subjectivity.
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- 1 Sonia Landy Sheridan, “Statement,” Untitled 9 (Carmel, CA: Friends of Photography, 1975), 26.
“We are now witnessing the reappearance of image-making as a human endeavor, made possible by instant-imaging technology.”1
- 2 Phil Jones, Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism (London: Verso, 2021) (...)
“Workers disappear in the long shadow of the machine.”2
- 3 Sonia Sheridan, “Generative Systems,” Afterimage 1, no. 2 (April 1972): 2.
- 4 Sheridan, “Generative Systems,” 3.
- 5 Diane Kirkpatrick, “Sonia Landy Sheridan,” Woman’s Art Journal 1, no. 1 (1980): 58.
- 6 Sheridan, “Generative Systems,” 2.
- 7 Sheridan, 2.
1In 1974, artists Sonia Landy Sheridan and Keith Smith were invited to put on an exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art’s project space. [Fig. 1] The nine works exhibited were large-scale, color images of a nude male figure (their friend and model Ric Puls) seen from the front, side, and back. [Figs. 2 & 3] The Man-Scan images, as they were individually titled, were created by means of a novel process for the time: color photocopying. In the years preceding the exhibition, Sheridan pioneered the use of the company 3M’s Color-in-Color (C-in-C) machine, and her experiments with imaging technology led her to establish the “Generative Systems” academic and teaching program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the fall of 1970.3 Smith had been one of Sheridan’s earliest students in the program, which the artist described as “an idea, an approach and a process that provides new dimensions to our continuing attempts to probe and express the emotional and intellectual lives of human beings.”4 Expanding out of her interest in printmaking, the Generative Systems program aimed to make use of “all available imaging technologies,” including photocopiers, tele-fax machines, and emerging photo-imaging machines from Xerox and 3M, in order to explore the “metamorphosis” and “degeneration” of images.5 For Sheridan, these new technologies were part of a “revolution in image making” that began with the invention of photography and allowed for “speed [and] simplicity,” minimizing “physical drudgery.”6 As she noted, self-generating imaging systems like the C-in-C machine could be “executed almost instantly […] as quickly as the artist thinks, the image is ready.”7
1. Kate Keller, installation view of Sonia Landy Sheridan and Keith Smith’s Man-Scan of Ric, Side View 1 at MoMA, New York, 1974
New York, Museum of Modern Art Archives.
© Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY
2. Dennis Longwell, Sonia Landy Sheridan and Keith Smith with Man-Scan of Ric, Side View 1, 1973
Montreal, Daniel Langlois Foundation.
© Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, Montreal
3. Kate Keller, installation view of Sonia Landy Sheridan and Keith Smith’s Man-Scan of Ric, Side View 1 (left) and Back View (right), 1974
New York, Museum of Modern Art Archives.
© Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY
2The self-generating and machine-based imaging technologies at the heart of Sheridan’s Generative Systems (the academic program was in existence for a single decade, 1970–80) appear almost antiquated from our current perspective. They were analog technologies that scanned and printed images using plate glass, light, and ink-based toners, while the resulting artworks, such as those Sheridan and Smith exhibited at MoMA, revealed the limits of the process and had a distinct materiality (each work being crafted from individual prints hand-sewn together to create large mosaics). Yet, Sheridan and Smith’s project is a historical touchstone for considering automated imaging technologies, which we are familiar today in the form of algorithmic and AI-based image processing.
- 8 Travis Diehl, “MoMA’s Daydream of Progress,” The New York Times, December 15, 2022, https://www.nyt (...)
3In fact, recent criticisms of artist Refik Anadol’s 2023 MoMA project, Unsupervised, a digital video installation based on a machine-learning model that interprets MoMA’s publicly available archive to produce a “continuously generating” digital image, were not unlike those leveled at Sheridan and Smith, when they had exhibited at the same institution nearly fifty years previously.8 Travis Diehl’s review of the Anadol exhibition made direct reference to the history of photography and the medium’s status within the museum, referring to Unsupervised as “patronizing” and “only a screen saver.” The art critic Jerry Saltz, writing for New York magazine, called the work a “lava lamp” and offered a disparaging assessment of it: “It’s derivative and familiar and struggles to transcend its source material.” These are but two examples of the many critics who approached Anadol’s project with a sense of techno-pessimism; however, the art editor and journalist Andrea K. Scott, writing a brief for The New Yorker, recognized the context: “There is also an element of the gatekeeping condescension that has dogged every form of machine-assisted art,” be it MoMA’s early championing of color photography or “new media” since the 1950s.
- 9 Peter Schjeldahl, “The Sheridan-Smith Show: A Misalliance of Art and Technology,” The New York Time (...)
4The New York Times covered Sheridan and Smith’s project twice, in one instance stating that its “whole interest” was “how-they-did-it data,” and in the other bemoaning the project’s apparent banality: “You can ‘generate’ so many things so quickly that you’re bound to get something of at least passing interest.”9 Lost in the fog of describing the artists’ process, these critics failed to see their subject matter, the human body, as a necessary part of work reflective of our shifting relationship with “instant-imaging technology.” Sheridan and Smith’s MoMA project not only showed how generative imaging could expand photography’s potential for serial automation but also focused on the precarity of the human subject, as both image and maker, in the shadow of increasingly efficient imaging technology.
The Secretary
- 10 Sonia Sheridan, as quoted in Diana Kirkpatrick, “The Art of Sonia Landy Sheridan: Exploring Pattern (...)
- 11 Kirkpatrick, “The Art of Sonia Landy Sheridan,” 18.
- 12 Kirkpatrick, 19.
- 13 Bob Greene, “She Was an Original, Not a Photocopy,” The Chicago Tribune, June 24, 1987, 2; Kelly St (...)
- 14 Kirkpatrick, “The Art of Sonia Landy Sheridan,” 19
- 15 Katherine Hart, introduction to Kirkpatrick, The Art of Sonia Landy Sheridan, 5.
- 16 Kirkpatrick, “The Art of Sonia Landy Sheridan,” 19.
- 17 Kirkpatrick, “Sonia Landy Sheridan,” 58.
- 18 Sonia Landy Sheridan quoted in “Projects: Sonia Landy Sheridan and Keith Smith,” Museum of Modern A (...)
5In 1968, Sheridan was teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and seeking “speedier ways to create serial images.”10 As discussed by art historian Diane Kirkpatrick, one option for automated imaging was to use the photo booth in the school’s cafeteria, while the other was to employ “the school’s lone Xerox machine.”11 Within the year, Sheridan would be “barred from using the school Xerox machine as an art tool,”12 as her work presaged what would become a trope of office party humor: photocopying your body on the copy machine.13 [Fig 4] Sheridan’s choice of subject, the human body, was reinforced when she was invited for a summer residency with the 3M corporation while they were developing the first color copy machine, the Color-in-Color system. According to Kirkpatrick, during the residency 3M prevented Sheridan from “bringing anything except a box of family photographs into 3M’s closed research facility, [so] Sheridan made images with the photos, parts of herself, and whatever else she found in the lab.”14 Despite her limits, researchers at 3M “found that [Sheridan] could make their machines do things that they had not foreseen,”15 showing how the technology was “less a copy machine than a versatile relative of the camera.”16 These early experiments proved vital, and inspired Sheridan to develop the Generative Systems program.17 Sheridan wrote that the goal of Generative Systems lay in “the generation of ideas with the aid of current technology.”18
4. Student lying on a 3M Color-in-Color photocopier within the framework of the Generative Systems program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1973
Montréal, Daniel Langlois Foundation.
© Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, Montreal
- 19 “3M Thermo-Fax Copying Machine, ‘Secretary’ Model, 1957–1960,” Object ID 2014.0.17.160, from the Co (...)
- 20 “Lucy’s Replacement,” Here’s Lucy, season 4, episode 19 (1972).
- 21 Sonia Landy Sheridan, untitled statement, The Inner Landscape and the Machine: A Visual Studies Wor (...)
6Sheridan’s initial residency led to a sustained collaboration with 3M, which allowed her and her students access to emerging imaging technologies. Generative Systems arrived at a moment when these technologies were rapidly transforming and automating white-collar labor. In 1957, 3M introduced its first thermo-fax copying machine, dubbed “The Secretary.”19 By 1972, popular culture had caught on: on the television show Here’s Lucy, secretary Lucy Hinkley Carter (played by Lucille Ball) was being replaced by a computer, “in the interest of efficiency.”20 Sheridan’s Generative Systems program was not only timely, but her practice of using automated imaging technology should be understood within the context of labor automation that was couched in a language of efficiency and its displacement of gendered secretarial labor. Sheridan, in both her writing and her work, sought connection between machinic and embodied labor. As she noted in 1974 about the Generative Systems program, “We try to understand how to integrate our own special human capacities with the machine’s capabilities,” employing “automatic imaging” that aspires to the “democratization” of image production.21 While Sheridan had a lengthy career marked by her championing of art and technology at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Projects: Sonia Landy Sheridan and Keith Smith, represented the most ambitious work to emerge from the Generative Systems work with 3M technology.
- 22 “Projects: Sonia Landy Sheridan and Keith Smith,” Museum of Modern Art, press release no. 47, June (...)
7In 1971, Sheridan was using the second version of 3M’s Color-in-Color machine, the System II, which made it possible to scale prints and transparencies and to produce images that could be “heat transferred” to cloth.22 Sheridan and Smith’s collaboration employed the System II machine to create multipartite scans of the human body, including one of Sheridan’s students, Ric Puls. [Fig. 2] These Man-Scan images were presented on polyester fabric as well as “bridal satin” and, as was the case with Man-Scan of Ric, Side View 1, 1973 [Fig. 1], draped around three walls in the MoMA’s project gallery. As we see in Side View 1, the model’s body is reproduced in a deliberate process across a grid of 368 scans (in this case), with each individual piece being roughly the scale of the machine’s 20 × 30 cm plate glass. The transferred prints were then hand-sewn together to create the unified whole. [Fig. 5] Seamless it is not, as stitching and the marks of mechanization are present and even emphasized: we see the lines between frames, both vertical and horizontal, marking the composition. Side View 1 measured just over 12.5 meters in length, while Back View was 14 meters in height, and was mostly gathered on the floor. [Fig. 3]
5. View of Man-Scan of Ric, Front View as it is being made by Sonia Landy Sheridan and Keith Smith, 1972
Montreal, Daniel Langlois Foundation.
© Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, Montreal
- 23 Vincent Bonin, “Color-in-Color Tool,” Foundation Daniel Langlois (2007), https://www.fondation-lang (...)
- 24 William D. Smith, “3M Seems to Have Won the Race for Color Copier; Company Plans to Introduce Its P (...)
- 25 “Projects: Sonia Landy Sheridan and Keith Smith,” Museum of Modern Art, press release no. 47, June (...)
8At such a scale, the Man-Scan images are as much a record of the limits of the color copy machine as they are scans of a model’s body. There are marks across each of the tiled photographs that serve as remnants of how C-in-C images are made: a dry printing process of scanning whatever is laid on the plate glass (sections of Puls’s body, in this case), which is translated into the full-color image after passing through several intermediate prints in yellow, magenta, and cyan and in grayscale.23 While this description overly simplifies a thirty-second process of great technical complexity and innovation,24 the process is not unfamiliar to anyone who has changed toner cartridges in current laser printers: charged and heated powder are transferred from printing drums to paper. The process by which Sheridan and Smith obtain the magnified image of their model’s body involves several additional intermediaries. As described by MoMA, and referencing the different machines they used, “Sheridan and Smith first move the model’s body across the image plate of the System I unit, thus producing a series of 8.5 × 11-inch prints. These one-to-one images are then cut up into smaller sections, converted to transparencies, and then enlarged into new color prints on the System II machine, which has enlargement capability. These prints are then heat-transferred rectangle-by-rectangle to cloth to yield the final image.”25 Given the intermediary prints, and the enlargement, the Man-Scan images elicit the degeneration Sheridan had expressed as part of working with Generative Systems technology. Rather than obscuring the machine, Sheridan and Smith’s images display color separation, high-contrast exposure, and a brilliant but limited tonal palette. The machine’s marks, mistakes, and variability are a further indication of how this serial, generative process entangles the body with emerging technology. In an era when the machine appears to be in the process of displacing the laboring body, Sheridan and Smith seek a means of communion indicative of how one sees the other.
The Handmaiden
- 26 In addition to Keith Smith, discussed here, see also the work of Betty Hahn, Catherine Jansen, Joan (...)
- 27 Matthew Brown and David G. Lowe, “Automatic Panoramic Image Stitching Using Invariant Features,” In (...)
- 28 For an excellent discussion of the histories of analog and digital photography intersecting at the (...)
9While the Generative Systems program was collaborating with 3M from the beginning, Sheridan was not the only artist of the period experimenting with machine imaging and photocopying.26 Smith, Sheridan’s student in the late 1960s, experimented with the C-in-C machine as early as 1969. [Fig 6] The aesthetics of the work on display at MoMA were Smith’s; the tiled mosaic of multiple images of the body to create a whole is a motif seen throughout his career. Bonnie Donohue, 1972, for example, presents a montage of different prints produced with C-in-C assembled into a singular whole. In later photobooks, such as When I Was Two [Book 68], from 1977, or Book Number 141 from 1989, [Fig. 7] tiling and stitching are consistent formal devices. Each of these works share in a particularly evocative process, one easily read on the surface: the stitching of image to image to create the overall form. Smith’s tiling and stitching further evinces the manner in which these machine-made images were foundational for digital imaging technologies; in the twenty-first century, image stitching has become an algorithmic, automatically generated aspect of computational photography.27 Like Sheridan, Smith’s engagement with emerging imaging technology, as well as his interest in photographic books and objects, speaks to an investment in the tactile qualities of photography at a moment when the medium’s path to digitization was just opening up.28
6. Keith Smith, Self-Portrait, November 26, 1969
Hand-stitched color photocopy, 35 × 41 cm.
© Keith Smith
7. Keith Smith, Book Number 141, May 1989
Artist’s book in which a cut-up analog print is reassembled, 19.1 × 19.1 cm (sheet), Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art.
© Keith Smith; © Philadelphia Museum of Art.
- 29 Schjeldahl, “The Sheridan-Smith Show.”
- 30 Schjeldahl.
- 31 Coleman, “Of Snapshots and Mechanizations.”
10As noted in the opening remarks of this essay, Sheridan and Smith’s 1974 MoMA exhibition aroused skepticism about the emerging imaging technology the work represented. Journalist and critic Peter Schjedahl, writing in The New York Times, was scornful: “Essentially, we are being asked to view a technological breakthrough as a breakthrough for art, and that’s a bit steep.”29 He continued in this vein, interpreting the “misalliance of art and technology” as producing an “intellectually bland and depersonalized kind of art.”30 Storied photography critic A. D. Coleman also discussed the project for The New York Times, writing of Sheridan and Smith’s use of the 3M machine: “The perversity of such a device is that it achieves the triumphant merchandising coup of turning process itself into product, thereby converting the artist into a consumer.” Continuing that the artist in this process becomes “passive,” Coleman wrote, “Perhaps we need to begin making some distinction between the tool and the servomechanism.”31
- 32 Schjeldahl, “The Sheridan-Smith Show,” 23. In his “Report” to the Chamber of Deputies in 1839, Domi (...)
- 33 Alfred Stieglitz, “The Photo-Secession,” in Bausch and Lomb Lens Souvenir (Rochester, NY: Bausch an (...)
11Coleman’s comments echo concerns about automation that have followed photography from its introduction in 1839 to present-day discussions about AI. Yet he appears to misconstrue the role of the artist as consumer, just as Schjeldahl, in his review, sees the message of the work as purely the labor involved in making it, “this how-they-did-it data.”32 Despite their animosity, the two critics nonetheless stumble upon a question that has haunted the history of machine-generated images: Is the human subject an active or passive agent, consuming or being consumed? It is worth recalling Alfred Stieglitz’s comments in 1903, when he spoke of the Photo-Secession group as being committed to the pursuit of photography’s “recognition, not as the handmaiden of art, but as a distinctive medium of individual expression.”33 Certainly Sheridan and Smith were producers, not consumers, and yet further deliberation is necessary in that, just as Stieglitz was publishing his statement within a journal published by Bausch & Lomb, Sheridan’s “Generative Systems” were, so to speak, a handmaiden to the corporation with whom she collaborated, 3M. Furthermore, it should be noted that Sheridan’s first public workshops and publication on the Generative Systems program took place at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, in 1971. Founded in 1969 by Nathan Lyons, who had served as a curator at the George Eastman House (founder of Kodak), the Visual Studies Workshop was one of several educational institutions with focused programming for photography in Rochester (the Rochester Institute of Technology being another significant institution), a city which was also the headquarters of several notable technology companies: Bausch & Lomb, Eastman Kodak, and Xerox.
- 34 Jennifer King writes that the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists, who wrote a response to the all (...)
- 35 Robin Lynch, “Man Scans,” Canadian Art Review 46, no. 1 (2021): 28.
12Sheridan’s Generative Systems program arrived alongside technologies of workplace automation and increasing partnerships between artists and corporate America. By the late 1960s, several exhibitions focused on the emerging formal relationships between the worlds of art and technology. Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1968, which traveled to Washington, DC, and San Francisco in 1969, featured a range of works that resulted from artists’ consultation with corporations such as Honeywell and Boeing. Some More Beginnings: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) opened at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1968. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)’s Art and Technology program, in operation between 1967 and 1971, concluded with the exhibition Art and Technology. LACMA’s program was peculiar in two distinct ways: every artist involved had worked with a corporation in Southern California, and only male artists were represented in the program.34 As the art historian Robin Lynch has pointed out, the fact that Sheridan’s contribution to the history of digital imaging has been overlooked relative to her male peers is indicative of the “systemic gendered barriers . . . [that] cut across multiple disciplines,” such as the realms of art and technology.35
- 36 W. Patrick McCray, “Art Out of Order: Jack Burnham the 1970 Software Show and the Aesthetics of Inf (...)
- 37 McCray, “Art Out of Order,” 705–6.
- 38 McCray, 705.
13Sheridan did, however, participate in the Software exhibition, held at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1970. [Fig. 8] Critics saw the exhibition as an utter failure. Interactive and self-generating projects were fraught with malfunctions, with the exception of Sheridan’s contribution, “Interactive Paper Systems.”36 Dressed in a white lab coat, as was her manner, Sheridan assisted visitors in using 3M’s C-in-C machine.37 While Sheridan’s project furthered her investment in how emerging imaging technology could be revelatory, immediate, and democratic and “opened up more doors for creative thinking,” her performative presence in a lab coat, according to historian Patrick McCray, gave “her the air and authority of a scientific researcher” and suggested an artist entangled in marketing corporate technology.38
8. Shunk-Kender, Sonia Sheridan (center) supervising the use of the 3M Color-in-Color photocopier at the opening of the Software exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York, September 16, 1970
© J. Paul Getty Trust
- 39 Lynch, “Man Scans,” 35. Lynch elaborates that Sheridan’s Generative Systems program “was conceived (...)
- 40 A complete list of the machines available in the Generative Systems program is noted in Sonia Landy (...)
- 41 Jennifer S. Light, “When Computers Were Women,” Technology and Culture 40, no. 3 (July 1999): 455–8 (...)
- 42 Peter Hunt Thompson, “In Time,” Untitled 9 (Carmel, California: Friends of Photography, 1975), 3. D (...)
14Sheridan’s role in collaborating with 3M is not so ambiguous. As Lynch has written, “Sheridan’s collaboration with 3M began in 1970 with the understanding that it could be a market-boosting enterprise, with Sheridan as the conduit and unofficial company representative for the creative potentials in colour scanning technologies.”39 In exchange, Sheridan (first as artist-in-residence and later as director of the Generative Systems program) received access to the company’s latest photocopying technology.40 Despite this, Sheridan’s performative gestures, from the lab coat to the bodily impression on the machine’s glass, convey an artist intentionally considering how technology reads the human body, and how (often-female) labor was made precarious by emerging office technologies. As noted by several scholars, gendered labor was foundational to the rise in computing during the mid-twentieth century; as Jennifer Light has noted, programming “originated as feminized clerical labor.”41 Furthermore, Sheridan’s misuse of the copy machine (noted at the beginning of this essay) implies that the company did not necessarily appreciate her work. As mentioned by Peter Hunt Thompson in 1975, “Negative reviews by critics and male nudes shown on 3-M materials at the Museum of Modern Art do not sit well with industrial publicity departments (which can overlook pornographic images passed out at industrial conventions—as long as they are of females).”42
- 43 Sheridan, “Statement,” 26.
- 44 Pamela M. Lee, Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Presen (...)
- 45 Lee, Think Tank Aesthetics, 127.
15Despite her corporate relations, Sheridan was genuinely concerned for how generative image making could come to transform our conceptions of the human body. As she wrote in 1975, “We will be governed and conditioned by scientifically produced technological tools. Every time we add a machine outside ourselves, we understand more about our bodies and therefore more about change and evolution in ourselves.”43 In the midst of rapid technological innovation, which was aimed at explicitly automating, if not replacing, gender-specific office labor, Sheridan’s focus on exposing and impressing the human body instills an unease about the very systems she employed. As such, Sheridan’s work presages what art historian Pamela Lee calls “algorithmic capitalism,” wherein subjectivity is “operationalized,”44 consumed rather than consuming. Schjeldahl was correct in seeing the Man-Scan images as “depersonalized,” but that appears to have been the point. Sheridan is not just a function of a broader operation but, like contemporaneous collaborations between artists and corporations, “serves as a kind of intelligible resource material.”45
The Odd Job
- 46 Antonella Corsani, “Beyond the Myth of Woman: The Becoming-Transfeminist of (Post-)Marxism,” trans. (...)
- 47 Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University P (...)
- 48 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 178, 174.
- 49 Lynch, “Man Scans,” 40.
16Sheridan’s Generative Systems program and its reliance on emerging office technologies aligned with art made in the service of corporate innovation, as well as a shift in the American economy to postindustrial, service labor. Sheridan worked with a range of technologies, mostly produced by 3M, such as thermo-fax machines and the company’s Variable Quality Copier, while she also used computer programming punch cards as well as the Haloid Xerox. Work representing her experiments across these technologies can be found in the exhibitions, Energized Artscience (1978) and The Art of Sonia Landy Sheridan (2009). Antonella Corsani succinctly defined the shift to a postindustrial economy as the “becoming-woman of labor . . . an activity that produces economic value, goods and services on the basis of extra-economic human qualities such as language, relational ability, and affectivity.”46 Such “affective service labor” suggests instability, precarity, and immateriality, alongside expectations of sociability and subjectivity.47 Theorist Sianne Ngai places Lucille Ball’s Lucy character as a face of this transition, a woman expected to perform across a litany of “temporary occupations,” and whose response is presented as “incapable of adjusting to new roles and social situations quickly.”48 Sheridan’s work, and her attention to technology specific to the office, not only merits its place in Ngai’s examples but likewise conveys that postindustrial “soft work” was conditioned by technology’s displacement of female labor. Robin Lynch’s work on Sheridan’s Generative Systems recognizes this kind of demotion in another sector as well—that of the female artist within a patriarchal system of art education.49
- 50 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 178.
- 51 Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Occupational Realism,” TDR: The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (Winter 2012), 35.
- 52 Bryan-Wilson, “Occupational Realism,” 35.
- 53 Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 62.
17Ngai reminds us of Linda Montano’s Odd Jobs (1973), a critical representation of “the overlap between cultural performance and service-economy labor.”50 In the project, Montano transformed acts of gender-coded labor, such as nursing and cleaning, into performances that highlighted “under-theorized” female labor.51 Not unlike Sheridan’s donning of a white lab coat, Montano’s work was inspired by the uniform. As Julia Bryan-Wilson has written, Montano’s “nurse outfit not only functioned as an apparently visible confirmation of her abilities to perform these tasks, but it also lent some credibility to her capacities by acting as an authorizing uniform.”52 Equally relevant is Martha Rosler’s 1976 video work, Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained, which documents the artist’s body being measured, and information collected in a bureaucratic manner. Rosler’s “aggressive stance toward both biological determinism and the prerogatives of the police,” as Allan Sekula wrote, reads as “counter-testimony and counter-surveillance,”53 outlining how the female body might be subjugated and distilled into immaterial information. Sheridan and Smith’s Man-Scan work rests between these two poles—the zany feminism of Montano’s Odd Jobs and the counter-disciplinary body of Rosler’s Vital Statistics. Sheridan and Smith were scanning, recording, and reproducing the body in a mechanistic manner, while Sheridan approached her work as a pseudo-scientist, dressing the part while intentionally misusing office technology. Pivoting between an emerging service economy and the algorithmic capitalism of the present, Sheridan and Smith’s work might be understood as an uneasy collaboration with corporate America that recognized the dematerialization of the laboring subject within a new regime of automated imaging technology.
- 54 Allan Sekula, “The Instrumental Image: Steichen at War,” Artforum 14, no. 4 (December 1975): 26–30.
- 55 Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures are Looking at You),” The New Inquiry, December 8, (...)
- 56 Thomas Keenan, “Counter-Forensics and Photography,” Grey Room 55 (2014): 62.
18Returning to the MoMA Project, we recognize how Sheridan and Smith’s work presages digital technology—the scanning, tiling, and stitching of images. Easily overlooked, though, is the materiality of the work. Printed on fabric, the material draws attention to weight, surface, and texture. As calculated and geometric as the compositions are, they refuse the clarity of the “instrumental image” we associate with mechanical and analytic forms of photography.54 The copy machine image, a self-generating mechanism, aspires to leave no trace, not unlike the “invisible plane” hidden from human vision in contemporary digital media.55 As Thomas Keenan writes, the “ideal mode of reading [instrumental images] would be not to have to read them at all.”56 In the machine-produced image, we should not see the machine at all—a transparent process between the viewer and the viewed. These are topics that remain current in our contemporary algorithmic capitalism in which service labor is replaced by automated systems. Sheridan’s collaboration with 3M was invested in a process of image production that disclosed the already entangled rise of automated labor with the human body, while Sheridan and Smith’s work imaged the body with the technology it was being displaced by. Their intentional repurposing and even misuse of office technology can be understood as a critique of the ways in which technology breaches and surveils the body, revealed through a process that both extends and distresses these machines’ ways of seeing. This breaking of the norms is invested less in the automatism such technologies represent and rather in the precarious disappearance of the laboring body in the process.
Notes
1 Sonia Landy Sheridan, “Statement,” Untitled 9 (Carmel, CA: Friends of Photography, 1975), 26.
2 Phil Jones, Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism (London: Verso, 2021), 6.
3 Sonia Sheridan, “Generative Systems,” Afterimage 1, no. 2 (April 1972): 2.
4 Sheridan, “Generative Systems,” 3.
5 Diane Kirkpatrick, “Sonia Landy Sheridan,” Woman’s Art Journal 1, no. 1 (1980): 58.
6 Sheridan, “Generative Systems,” 2.
7 Sheridan, 2.
8 Travis Diehl, “MoMA’s Daydream of Progress,” The New York Times, December 15, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/arts/design/refik-anadol-unsupervised-moma-review.html; Jerry Saltz, “MoMA’s Glorified Lava Lamp,” New York, February 22, 2023, https://www.vulture.com/article/jerry-saltz-moma-refik-anadol-unsupervised.html; Andrea K. Scott, “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised,” The New Yorker, March 6, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/art/refik-anadol-unsupervised.
9 Peter Schjeldahl, “The Sheridan-Smith Show: A Misalliance of Art and Technology,” The New York Times, June 23, 1974, 23; A. D. Coleman, “Of Snapshots and Mechanizations,” The New York Times, July 14, 1974, 26.
10 Sonia Sheridan, as quoted in Diana Kirkpatrick, “The Art of Sonia Landy Sheridan: Exploring Patterns in the Flow,” in The Art of Sonia Landy Sheridan (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2009), 18.
11 Kirkpatrick, “The Art of Sonia Landy Sheridan,” 18.
12 Kirkpatrick, 19.
13 Bob Greene, “She Was an Original, Not a Photocopy,” The Chicago Tribune, June 24, 1987, 2; Kelly Stout, “As the Art World Reckons with #MeToo, Many Ask ‘What About Butt Xeroxes?,’” Jezebel, April 19, 2018, https://jezebel.com/as-the-art-world-reckons-with-metoo-many-ask-what-abo-1825390940; Brian VanHooker, “A Very Important Cultural History of People Photocopying Their Butts,” Mel Magazine (2019), https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/a-very-important-cultural-history-of-people-photocopying-their-butts.
14 Kirkpatrick, “The Art of Sonia Landy Sheridan,” 19
15 Katherine Hart, introduction to Kirkpatrick, The Art of Sonia Landy Sheridan, 5.
16 Kirkpatrick, “The Art of Sonia Landy Sheridan,” 19.
17 Kirkpatrick, “Sonia Landy Sheridan,” 58.
18 Sonia Landy Sheridan quoted in “Projects: Sonia Landy Sheridan and Keith Smith,” Museum of Modern Art, press release no. 47, June 5, 1974.
19 “3M Thermo-Fax Copying Machine, ‘Secretary’ Model, 1957–1960,” Object ID 2014.0.17.160, from the Collection of Henry Ford, The Benson Ford Research Center, https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-collections/artifact/403708.
20 “Lucy’s Replacement,” Here’s Lucy, season 4, episode 19 (1972).
21 Sonia Landy Sheridan, untitled statement, The Inner Landscape and the Machine: A Visual Studies Workshop Exhibition (Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 1974).
22 “Projects: Sonia Landy Sheridan and Keith Smith,” Museum of Modern Art, press release no. 47, June 5, 1974.
23 Vincent Bonin, “Color-in-Color Tool,” Foundation Daniel Langlois (2007), https://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=2027.
24 William D. Smith, “3M Seems to Have Won the Race for Color Copier; Company Plans to Introduce Its Process Next Week at Industry Show,” The New York Times, October 22, 1968, 59.
25 “Projects: Sonia Landy Sheridan and Keith Smith,” Museum of Modern Art, press release no. 47, June 5, 1974.
26 In addition to Keith Smith, discussed here, see also the work of Betty Hahn, Catherine Jansen, Joan Lyons, Bea Nettles, and Joel Swartz.
27 Matthew Brown and David G. Lowe, “Automatic Panoramic Image Stitching Using Invariant Features,” International Journal of Computer Vision 74 (2007): 59–73; Srishty Suman, Utkarsh Rastogi, and Rajat Tiwari, “Image Stitching Algorithms: A Review,” Circulation in Computer Science 1, no. 2 (December 2016): 14–18.
28 For an excellent discussion of the histories of analog and digital photography intersecting at the point of materiality, see Katharina Fackler, “Of Stereoscopes and Instagram: Materiality, Affect, and the Senses from Analog to Digital Photography,” Open Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (2019): 519–30.
29 Schjeldahl, “The Sheridan-Smith Show.”
30 Schjeldahl.
31 Coleman, “Of Snapshots and Mechanizations.”
32 Schjeldahl, “The Sheridan-Smith Show,” 23. In his “Report” to the Chamber of Deputies in 1839, Dominique François Arago stated, “The rapidity of the method has probably astonished the public more than anything else.” Arago, “Report,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 19. The concerns of automation and accelerationism remain a point of discussion.
33 Alfred Stieglitz, “The Photo-Secession,” in Bausch and Lomb Lens Souvenir (Rochester, NY: Bausch and Lomb Optical, 1903); reprinted in Richard Whelan, ed., Stieglitz on Photography: His Selected Essays and Notes (New York: Aperture, 2000), 154.
34 Jennifer King writes that the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists, who wrote a response to the all-male Art and Technology program, “succeeded in reorienting some of the conversations about artists and technology from the sci-fi realm of speculative conjectures to more immediate issues of sexual discrimination and equal opportunity.” Jennifer King, “I, Computer: Artists and Technology Exhibitions, 1968–1971,” in Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982, ed. Leslie Jones (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2023), 228.
35 Robin Lynch, “Man Scans,” Canadian Art Review 46, no. 1 (2021): 28.
36 W. Patrick McCray, “Art Out of Order: Jack Burnham the 1970 Software Show and the Aesthetics of Information Systems,” Technology and Culture 63, no. 3 (July 2022): 705. McCray also quotes participating artist Agnes Denes’s comment on the exhibition’s “overall incompetence” (709).
37 McCray, “Art Out of Order,” 705–6.
38 McCray, 705.
39 Lynch, “Man Scans,” 35. Lynch elaborates that Sheridan’s Generative Systems program “was conceived as a ‘research center’ and was largely structured around 3M scanning technologies” (37).
40 A complete list of the machines available in the Generative Systems program is noted in Sonia Landy Sheridan, “Mind/Senses/Hand: The Generative Systems Program at the Art Institute of Chicago 1970–1980,” in “New Foundations: Classroom Lessons in Art/Science/Technology for the 1990s,” special issue, Leonardo 23, nos. 2/3 (1990): 175–81.
41 Jennifer S. Light, “When Computers Were Women,” Technology and Culture 40, no. 3 (July 1999): 455–83. See also Janet Abbate, Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012).
42 Peter Hunt Thompson, “In Time,” Untitled 9 (Carmel, California: Friends of Photography, 1975), 3. Despite the comment, there is no archival documentation of 3M’s concern for the male nude images Sheridan and Smith produced for the MoMA exhibition.
43 Sheridan, “Statement,” 26.
44 Pamela M. Lee, Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020), 22 (emphasis in the original).
45 Lee, Think Tank Aesthetics, 127.
46 Antonella Corsani, “Beyond the Myth of Woman: The Becoming-Transfeminist of (Post-)Marxism,” trans. Timothy S. Murphy, SubStance 112 (2007): 126.
47 Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 174.
48 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 178, 174.
49 Lynch, “Man Scans,” 40.
50 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 178.
51 Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Occupational Realism,” TDR: The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (Winter 2012), 35.
52 Bryan-Wilson, “Occupational Realism,” 35.
53 Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 62.
54 Allan Sekula, “The Instrumental Image: Steichen at War,” Artforum 14, no. 4 (December 1975): 26–30.
55 Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures are Looking at You),” The New Inquiry, December 8, 2016, https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-images-your-pictures-are-looking-at-you/.
56 Thomas Keenan, “Counter-Forensics and Photography,” Grey Room 55 (2014): 62.
Top of pageList of illustrations
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| Title | 1. Kate Keller, installation view of Sonia Landy Sheridan and Keith Smith’s Man-Scan of Ric, Side View 1 at MoMA, New York, 1974 |
| Caption | New York, Museum of Modern Art Archives. |
| Credits | © Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/transbordeur/docannexe/image/2538/img-1.jpg |
| File | image/jpeg, 466k |
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| Title | 2. Dennis Longwell, Sonia Landy Sheridan and Keith Smith with Man-Scan of Ric, Side View 1, 1973 |
| Caption | Montreal, Daniel Langlois Foundation. |
| Credits | © Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, Montreal |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/transbordeur/docannexe/image/2538/img-2.jpg |
| File | image/jpeg, 718k |
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| Title | 3. Kate Keller, installation view of Sonia Landy Sheridan and Keith Smith’s Man-Scan of Ric, Side View 1 (left) and Back View (right), 1974 |
| Caption | New York, Museum of Modern Art Archives. |
| Credits | © Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/transbordeur/docannexe/image/2538/img-3.jpg |
| File | image/jpeg, 527k |
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| Title | 4. Student lying on a 3M Color-in-Color photocopier within the framework of the Generative Systems program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1973 |
| Caption | Montréal, Daniel Langlois Foundation. |
| Credits | © Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, Montreal |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/transbordeur/docannexe/image/2538/img-4.jpg |
| File | image/jpeg, 518k |
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| Title | 5. View of Man-Scan of Ric, Front View as it is being made by Sonia Landy Sheridan and Keith Smith, 1972 |
| Caption | Montreal, Daniel Langlois Foundation. |
| Credits | © Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, Montreal |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/transbordeur/docannexe/image/2538/img-5.jpg |
| File | image/jpeg, 705k |
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| Title | 6. Keith Smith, Self-Portrait, November 26, 1969 |
| Caption | Hand-stitched color photocopy, 35 × 41 cm. |
| Credits | © Keith Smith |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/transbordeur/docannexe/image/2538/img-6.jpg |
| File | image/jpeg, 437k |
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| Title | 7. Keith Smith, Book Number 141, May 1989 |
| Caption | Artist’s book in which a cut-up analog print is reassembled, 19.1 × 19.1 cm (sheet), Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art. |
| Credits | © Keith Smith; © Philadelphia Museum of Art. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/transbordeur/docannexe/image/2538/img-7.jpg |
| File | image/jpeg, 490k |
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| Title | 8. Shunk-Kender, Sonia Sheridan (center) supervising the use of the 3M Color-in-Color photocopier at the opening of the Software exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York, September 16, 1970 |
| Credits | © J. Paul Getty Trust |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/transbordeur/docannexe/image/2538/img-8.jpg |
| File | image/jpeg, 653k |
References
Electronic reference
Chris Balaschak, ““The Secretary”. Labor and Automation in Sonia Landy Sheridan’s Generative Systems Curriculum”, Transbordeur [Online], 9 | 2025, Online since 26 February 2025, connection on 13 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/transbordeur/2538; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/13dx0
Top of pageCopyright
The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.
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