Artist, April Greiman: Hi, I am April Greiman. You're looking at a work called DOES IT MAKE SENSE?. It's a two-foot by six-foot offset lithographed portrait of me. The piece originally folds down into a magazine format for a journal called Design Quarterly.
I used the first professional video equipment from Sony that hooked up to my Macintosh. It would actually scan the video image and make it into pixels. For me, the video texture was something really appealing. It was like a weaving.
I kept hearing critics saying that this was crap and they'd rather just keep working with a pencil and a pen. I finally just said, for me, the computer was just another pencil, another way to express your ideas visually. But in fact, I found it to be the first really smart tool that was co-creative. My idea pushed through this technological tool came out with a hybrid of things that I couldn't have imagined, nor could I have ever sketched with a pencil.
I was struggling, at that time, being criticized for ruining design. And I found this interesting quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was an architect in Vienna. It says, "If you give it a sense, it makes sense." The digitized portrait of myself using a new technology is the outcome of making sense of who I was and what I explore creatively.