In postmodern work of the 1970s and mid to late-‘80s there was huge diversity, with no one unifying philosophy as far as I can remember. In fact, that was half the point. Some work was political, some decorative, some Punk, some academic, etc. I think I overlap with this broad trend only to the extent that my work in that period was “hybrid,” a quality common to all my activities since, in ever-wider contexts. 

My academic training in the early ‘70s at the Basel Allgemeine Kunstgewerbeschule was in the controlled yet playful tradition (thank you Wolfgang Weingart) of classic Swiss graphic design. I entered the school both to study typography, and to go into textile design. Armin Hoffman — director of my both my class and the graphic design program at the school — said I had to work in his program first before I could work in textiles, so I focused on typography. Working with handset type forces you to communicate an idea by the way you handle the lettering itself, without any other illustrative material — it becomes its own narrative. In retrospect, I can see how easily this experience sponsored a way of seeing type — and in fact everything — as an object in space. Type as a building, type as a landscape, type in a landscape with other ‘objects.’ 

Cut: to my move to Los Angeles and the discovery of a natural landscape that I felt I could call ‘home,’ the desert, the place that opened my mind to space and time at a completely new scale. In my early collaboration in LA with Jayme Odgers (as Visual Energy, from 1978–81) we worked with traditional photographic and typographic art and literally, physically, layered it into a single image pasted up as in traditional collage, airbrushing out the edge conditions, and then re-photographing that — which became the final art. In combination with Jayme’s original photography, there was a lot of using pre-printed images, illustrations — often with the offset lithography dot-screen ‘look’ — then enlarging them, pasting them up, collaging them together. We also utilized a fair amount of appropriation: “cut the turnip out of the printed seed pack and paste that onto the Spacemat art,” and so on. Original photography combined with painting and typography — the elements interacting, seemingly spontaneously, to create a space of their own. 

As my own work evolved, I began to move away from the traditional cut and paste, two-dimensional collage process into different paradigms for creating space. My exposure to videography — real space/time — as head of the program in Visual Communication at CalArts led to commissions in this medium, as in early TV spots for Esprit, Lifetime Television, US West, etc. In the Pacific Wave poster (ca. 1985), for example, which I produced with a 512k version of the first Macintosh computer, I began to explore digital space, both literally and conceptually, zooming into an image of a wave to reveal the information as pixels, which became like snowballs. I was interested in revealing the DNA of the technology “in the wave,” micro to macro, expressed in spatial relationships and visual hierarchies. In a sense, this is an echo of my earlier interest in textile design, now transformed into the pure textures of technology. This interest was also reflected in the re-naming of my business “Greimanski Labs: a purely scientific approach” — a tongue in cheek characterization of my experimental approach. 

In conventional “pasteup” I would have begun with a sketching phase, perhaps a mockup of the individual elements printed from photos or sketched from real objects. However, when I began to work with the computer I soon found that everything became much more intuitive, more about process and accidental discovery, since the digital medium enables intuition to extend much further into the design process. I might, for example, shoot a high-quality still photo of a video off a tv monitor, then layer that into a half-finished digital composition to see what the image then became. A design is simply a moment — a freeze-frame — in a continuing process. I quickly learned to enjoy not having to preconceive the form that my projects might take, jumping into a void and exploring until something unexpected began to emerge. I developed a floating, yet three-dimensionally gridded visual approach in which static and dynamic X,Y and Z coordinates were at play. There was always an implicit structure that found a point of equilibrium between intuition and conscious choice. I think intuition is the most powerful form of intelligence.  

Similarly, working with the Quantel Paintbox in the early ‘80s (a sophisticated high-resolution digital image composer designed for broadcast television, video production and the motion picture industry), I was never interested in what it was supposedly good at: the seamless combination of images. I was always interested in the texture of the technology behind it. If I was using video, the video texture became part of the content of the image; if I was using the computer, the pixel texture became part of the content of the image. I want everything to “be” its medium. The being is the meaning, the meaning the being.

My personal design history has been one ever-evolving synergy with the rapid evolution of technology. That is, my design process has always been in an elaborate state of transformation, from two-dimensional design to motion graphics to design for the Internet, to, more recently, an opening out to architectural and environmental issues. In fact, for some time now my work has been more to do with the real environment than with graphic design as such, though I still have the same underlying concerns. 

I’ve been teaching at SciArc (The Southern California School of Architecture) for nearly 20 years. I continue to appreciate and produce graphic work, but for me the big issues are now found in architecture and the environment. The transition from tiles and tapestries to environmental graphics to large-scale work in real space has been essentially effortless, since, in a sense, the approach is the same in architecture as in all my design. Now, when I do produce a purely graphic design solution, it reflects the influence of this experience. The web site for Roto Architects (http://www.rotoark.com) is a case in point. Even the company's identifying logotype is a subtly moving object in a real space, like the perception of a building in a landscape, coexisting with other typographic elements in a common “site.”  

Conversely, my large (8200 sq ft) mural project on Wilshire Boulevard for a mixed-use transportation hub takes a hybrid media technique that I might have used in a 2-dimensional composition, and translates it into a real space — two juxtaposed walls of a video image produced on the computer and applied to the wall surfaces by conventional sign painters. The viewer is invited to travel through a graphic space that defines an actual space: “transmedia,” as I call it! 

If there has been a constant in my journey, whatever the medium or context, it is a desire to create space as I define it: a field of energy, an interplay of elements in a dynamic balance between discipline and play, material and immaterial — all captured in a single, simultaneous moment in time-space.