Muriel Cooper (1925–1994) was a graphic designer who spent the bulk of her career working at MIT. In the mid-50s, she started as a designer in the Office of Publications. By the mid-60s she was the first Design Director at the MIT Press, where she rationalized their production system and designed classic books like The Bauhaus (1969) and Learning from Las Vegas (1972), along with about 500 others. In the mid-70s she founded the Visible Language Workshop in MIT’s Department of Architecture, where she taught experimental printing and hands-on production. And by the mid-80s, she was a founding member of the MIT Media Lab, designing early computer interfaces. (from an interview with Robert Wiesenberger talking about Murial on the Walker design blog)

go to the interview
i'm breaking some rules here with Murial Cooper's Bauhaus poster. it just didn't seem right to paint her work as she was so invested in experimenting with new media in graphic design. so for this series, i worked from a cropped image of her 1969, poster promoting the Bauhaus book. i played around with the different settings in illustrator's auto trace function getting increasingly decayed copies of the work.
perhaps this project belongs in the process section of this site because it is not at all a faithful copy. (or perhaps i am getting a bit tired of being a faithful copier.) while this may be a diversion from my stated process for the project, i think the effort to learn from predecessors, and consider the different between influence and emulation remains on target. and the residual pieces are quite satisfying.
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