The VQC whirred to life and a scanning beam of light passed across Sheridan’s face, initiating the electrostatic leap of pigmented powder to paper. The copier then delivered a single print to its human collaborator.
In the print, soft shadows fade into matte, featureless black, while certain swaths of skin (cheek, fingertips, eyelid) highlight bright, white office paper.
Other areas reveal extraordinary detail: the gentle press of eyelashes, individual strands of Sheridan’s hair crisp against the picture plane, or deep folds of skin created as Sheridan’s cheek flattened against the copier’s glass plate.
In the upper register, Sheridan’s blurry face marks her movement “in time” with the scanning light.
Ghostly fingertips emerge from the dark depths of the top right corner, clutching the image closest to the picture plane, and revealing that the print is, in fact, a copy of a copy.
The Variable Quality Copier used zinc oxide-coated electrostatic paper, which was then thermally fused with iron oxide powder using a rolling magnet similar to a lithographic roll. Sheridan put dense, velvety Color-in-Color powder into the VQC system, upending the system’s strict rules of engagement to make Sonia in Time and other self-portraits. The result: an almost three-dimensional effect of ink on paper in the final prints, in which Sheridan’s body takes shape from highly contrasted stacks of black powder outlining bare recesses of paper.
Sonia Sheridan manipulating a “VQC” copier in the Generative Systems classroom at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1976
Photographer unknown. The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, Sonia Landy Sheridan fonds. 0501-1. Courtesy Daniel Langlois Foundation
With the help of artist residencies and close collaboration with 3M scientists, Sheridan acquired the machine for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Generative Systems program, which she had founded in 1969. Generative Systems was the first university program in the country exclusively dedicated to exploring the artistic potential of emerging technologies, allowing students to work with “machines, electrostatics, magnetics, heat, sound, and transmission.”
Responding to Chicago’s fraught political milieu in the early 1970s, Sheridan sought tools that would enable artists to more effectively participate in local and national political movements. In the wake of the violence committed against protestors at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and amidst ongoing demonstrations for Women’s Liberation and against the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, Generative Systems participants explored technologies whose instantaneous image production lent themselves to the creation of political ephemera for distribution at unprecedented speeds.
Generative Systems student leaning onto copier, 1973
Photographer unknown. The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, Sonia Landy Sheridan fonds. 0501-110. Courtesy Daniel Langlois Foundation.
Sonia Sheridan manipulating the “C-in-C” (Color-in-Color) copier in Generative Systems classroom, 1978
Photographer unknown. The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, Sonia Landy Sheridan fonds. 0501-1. Courtesy Daniel Langlois Foundation.
At the same time, participants explored the formal capacities of the machines, rendering everyday objects alien via the copier’s vision. Yet, even as they were conscripted into radical distribution practices, tools like the copier and early desktop computer flowed from the market for the modern office and hailed a different cultural milieu: the gendered ecology of labor in the mid-century office.
After decades of so-called duplicator machines, in the 1960s, new copiers flooded the market—in particular, the Xerox 914, which promised unprecedented ease and speed. Frequently, operators (most often women) were hired for the sole task of operating these large and oft-unruly copiers.
Advertisement for the Xerox 914 copier, appearing in Fortune Magazine, September 1961
An ad for the Xerox 914, for example, pictures a smiling woman operating the copier while on the phone, her blurry hand speedily collecting prints. The ad suggests to the machines’ buyers that the purchase of a Xerox 914 might also include a darling operator, tethered to the machine and acquiescing to every copier-related command. “Any number you want, sir.”
Still, even as the machines represented a site of gendered labor and an inability to climb the workplace ladder, they offered moments of irreverent play. In 1980, for example, 21-year-old secretary Jodi Stutz climbed atop a copier at Deere & Co. and printed an image of her buttocks while her coworker stood guard. Delighted by the outcome, she distributed the print around the office and was promptly fired, making national news in the process.
This daring gesture performs an embodied intimacy that positions the copier as collaborator much less in rote duplication than in rebellion and profanity. Under Stutz’s (bad) influence, an alternate reading of the Xerox 914 advertisement might find a cheeky menace in the undertones of the operator’s “sir,” as she hangs up the phone, interrupts the machine’s incessant production of duplicates, and climbs atop it herself in an act of refusal and ownership.
When I look at Sonia in Time, I imagine what it might have been like to open the lid of one of these unwieldy machines and press my body onto its surface, relinquishing all expectations for the resulting image to the machine.
And I wonder what might happen if I try on my own copier—tiny as it is, tucked beneath my desk.
In a world without works of art close at hand, how might we engage the things around us in ways that expand our roles as practitioners and researchers? How might embodied experience itself, or engaging haptically with a technology, reorient our understanding of works of art?
Looking at Sheridan, I think, too, of Jodi Stutz. I am reminded that she was fired for her erotic, irreverent stunt. I wonder if we might additionally begin to see the everyday objects and technologies that surround us as playful machinic collaborators, while also considering how they might index unseen worlds of labor, power, and oppression.
—Jessica Hough
