Imagine using a computer without a monitor, typing words on the keyboard and hoping something worked.

“I don’t think people can even imagine that right now, I can’t,” said Amanda Wick, archivist for the University of Minnesota Libraries’ Charles Babbage Institute (CBI), a premier research center and archive for the history of computing and information technology.

The digital world would be entirely opaque without screens and graphics, without computer artists and designers, without people like Maureen Nappi.

Nappi was a visual artist who, over her career, made music videos for MTV, The Ramones, Black Flag, The Go-Gos, and more; pioneered the No Wave Movement in New York City; and set the standard for defining and describing computer arts.

Her archive and personal papers — containing decades of computer, sketches, and teaching materials — were recently donated to the Charles Babbage Institute and will soon be available to researchers. Nappi’s renowned computer graphics work defines how we interact with computers and makes us interrogate the intersection of technology and culture, Wick said, an area of research that has been getting more attention in the past few years.

“How are people using this technology, who is using it, how does it create a power structure that we as a society operate in?” Wick said.

“If you’re interested in what the arts scene in the late ‘70s and ‘80s in NYC was like, if you want to tap into the energy of that scene, the incredibly creative and vibrant art and gallery scene, then you’ll be interested in this collection,” she added.

The No Wave artist from Philly

Nappi “was an artist from the beginning,” said Jennifer Shaw-Spence, the project archivist who is processing her materials. At 14, she was recognized for her sculptural work in her hometown of Philadelphia. She attended the Moore College of Art before transferring to New York University. During her studies, she fell in love with film and the visual arts.

She dropped out of Moore College and moved to New Haven, Connecticut, to pursue art full-time. There she joined the feminist art scene and co-founded an all-women’s house painting business.

Nappi then moved to New York City and finished her degree in 1976. She discovered computer arts through a class called “Art Speak on the Art Speak Machine,” where she made art on an equivalent of a large graphing calculator.

Around this time, she discovered the No Wave movement, an avant-garde music and visual arts scene that stood against the heavily-commercialized new wave genre. Like the atonal, loud dissonance of no wave music, No Wave Cinema was likewise DIY, gritty, and low-budget.

She started frequenting Wednesdays at A’s, a warehouse loft in Lower Manhattan where experimental artist Arleen Schloss held a hybrid arts and music series. This small saloon became the epicenter of No Wave art, and Nappi was a regular participant.

Nappi became more noticed for her videography and began filming music videos for The Pop Network, which distributed them to video lounges. She made videos for bands like Black Flag, The Go-Gos, Tito Puente, Waitress, and Echo and the Bunnymen. Most notably, she directed “We Want The Airwaves” by The Ramones. Nappi went on to work for MTV and was hired by several music venues to handle production design.

 

At the Peppermint Lounge, a famous nightclub in Greenwich Village, Nappi designed a 16-screen CCTV setup and advocated for local artists to be featured there. She constantly argued for the legitimacy of film and computer arts as a viable, “serious art form,” Shaw-Spence said.

Nappi was also an art director for 1985’s “Sun City: Artists United Against Apartheid” and 2004’s “At Home with the Brave for the Holidays,” did graphics for 1987’s “The Original Max Talking Headroom Show” on HBO, and was a titles designer for 1986’s “John Lennon: Live in New York City.”

Painting with pixels

Nappi devoted the latter half of her life almost entirely to teaching and research, specifically on computers and art. In 2002, she was hired as an adjunct associate professor at Long Island University, eventually transitioning into a tenure-track position, which she held until her retirement in 2021.

During her research, Nappi noted that the language used to describe traditional 2D art doesn’t always translate to digital canvases; “You aren’t moving a paintbrush yourself. You aren’t snapping the photograph yourself. You’re using algorithms, essentially, to create these lines,” Shaw-Spence said.

And unlike traditional mediums, computers aren’t just creation devices. They’re also dissemination devices, and artists can do both simultaneously. They can modify art already created and reverse the clock to earlier versions of a project. Computer arts has a derivative aspect that isn’t found elsewhere.

So in her 2002 dissertation, “Language, memory and volition: toward an aesthetics of computer arts,” Nappi updated the lingo and created the standard definition of computer arts that’s still used by researchers today.

 

Nappi’s work has international reach and recognition. She was heavily involved with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)’s SIGGRAPH, a special interest group dedicated to computer graphics and longtime partner of CBI, and was a member of Veteran Feminists of America and the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN). She served on INN’s board of directors for 20 years and as its president in 2012.

Honoring women creators in the archive

Nappi’s collection has over 700 items, spanning decades of technology: hard drives, betacam videos, pneumatic, reels upon reels, audio cassettes, CDs, 3-inch and 5.25-inch floppy disks, and more.

“In a technical world, that’s a millennium. She went from using essentially a giant graphic calculator to having email and the worldwide web at her fingertips,” Shaw-Spence said.

The collection contains both analog and digital art, footage from her music videos, visual moving pictures; family records like her grandfather’s citizenship documents, weddings, and family photographs; and her teaching materials, much written in her own hand.

Shaw-Spence’s favorite items in the collection are Nappi’s art pieces (one is currently her desktop background). She particularly enjoys the pieces created on metal canvases and metallic paper, which mimic the backlight of a computer screen. It’s similar to the luminescent quality of oil paintings that bend light through the oils and back out towards the viewer.

Most of her physical materials have been identified and rehoused, and the digital materials are being transferred to modern file formats. Her magnetic tapes, for example, have been shipped to a third-party vendor for digitization.

Since the collection is very tech-heavy and visual-heavy, the project has been a crash course for Archives and Special Collections on handling and preserving this volume of audio/visual magnetic media, with its obscure and outdated formats, and little standardization, Shaw-Spence said.

Financially, the donation to process Nappi’s collection has been “transformational,” Wick said. It’s been large enough to digitize several other collections by women creators in CBI, particularly those who pioneered computer programming languages like Fortran and COBOL.

“This is what we have needed to really do the work to honor some of these collections and make them freely accessible,” Wick said.

The entire collection will soon be available for researchers on-site at Andersen Library. However, some materials won’t be available online due to copyright restrictions in cases where Nappi wasn’t the sole creator or didn’t hold the copyright herself.

For further questions about the Nappi Collection please email Curator Amanda Wick at abwick@umn.edu, or to make a donation to CBI please email Development Director Heather Beaton at hbeaton@umn.edu.