Eudice Feder

Eudice Feder, born in 1918, was an American artist, painter, photographer, jewelry designer, educator, and pioneer of computer graphics. She studied at the Cleveland School of Art before continuing her education at the New Bauhaus School of Design in Chicago between 1939 and 1942. Feder later earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from California State University in 1974, followed by a Master of Arts degree in 1981 through a special interdisciplinary program in Art, Computer Science, and Psychology. During the 1940s she worked as an artist for the Works Progress Administration in San Francisco, and in the 1950s she designed modernist jewelry using silver and natural stones. 

In the late 1970s, Feder joined a computer graphics programming course that invited artists to participate. She learned to code and worked with SIMPLOT, a graphics system written in the programming language SIMULA. Using computers and pen plotters loaded with ballpoint pens and liquid ink, she produced abstract images built from dense arrangements of lines, moiré patterns, and geometric structures. Her works often referenced landscapes, water, light, desert environments, and biblical themes. Feder’s studies under artists and educators László Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes at the New Bauhaus in Chicago shaped her interest in light, design, photography, and material processes. Her 1980 thesis exhibition, From Zero to One, reflected her interest in the relationship between art, science, technology, psychology, and human experience. Influenced by Moholy-Nagy’s concept of “truth to materials,” she approached the computer as a tool for visual experimentation and image making.

Feder’s work appeared in exhibitions and conferences dedicated to art and technology, including SIGGRAPH exhibitions in Boston, Detroit, San Francisco, and Dallas, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Bronx Museum of Art, and Nicograph in Tokyo. She lectured in the United States and Israel on computer graphics, visual education, and the relationship between art and technology, and taught digital graphics output through plotter systems at California State University, Northridge. Her work is represented in archives and collections including the ACM SIGGRAPH History Archive, the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the U.S. General Services Administration Fine Arts Collection. Feder lived and worked in Los Angeles for most of her career and passed away in 2018.