Lucia Grossberger Morales

Lucia Grossberger Morales began her computer art career in 1979 when she purchased her Apple II computer after dreaming the Apple II was a magic light box. In 1982, along with Harry Vertelney, she coauthored The Designer's Toolkit, a graphics program published by Apple Computer, Inc. The Designer's Toolkit was shown "The Artist and the Computer" at the Long Beach Museum of Art and "The Artist in the Lab" at Harvard University. It was considered the premier graphics program for the Apple II. In 1986, along with Bob Bishop, Grossberger Morales coauthored Space Lace: An Interactive Kaleidoscope, an educational package to teach about the algorithms for creating a kaleidoscope pattern. 

Grossberger Morales was born in Bolivia and emigrated to the US when she was three. Much of her work is inspired by her homeland. The shrine "Huaca" means sacred objects, places, or deities in Quechua, Bolivia's most significant Indigenous language. Huaca combines Grossberger Morales's  Andean homeland with the logic of the computer. The installation is seven-foot high, eight-foot-wide, and three-foot deep, painted green, purple, orange, and blue—the same colors as the primitive Apple II. Below Huaca's Andean cross is a peephole in the shape of an upward-facing triangle; through the peephole appears virtually infinite, rapidly transforming kaleidoscopic patterns generated by SpaceLace software In Art and America, Zsofi Valyi-Nagy wrote about Huaca, Her computer sculpture offers a Southern California counterpart to Nam June Paik's iconic Portable God (1989), made around the same time and exhibited upstairs. These objects recall a transitional time for media technologies not unlike our own; while Morales's altar requires the visitor's touch to activate it, Paik's invites more passive interaction."

in 1987, she had the color Mac, Macromedia director, and a CD-ROM burner, the tools she needed to talk about her personal history, Bolivian politics, and LatinX and Indigenous culture. Grossberger Morales' interactive CD-ROM Sangre Boliviana incorporates animations, text, images, sound, voice, and interactivity to further her personal story's narrative and emotional content. Grossberger Morales) reflect upon and recreate the fragmentary and layered nature of memory and of cultural hybridity

In Next Level, Mary Flannagan writes, Flannagan describes the Piece Cholera 92. "The arcade game experience entitled "Cholera 92" explores the Bolivian cholera outbreak in 1992, in which 500 people perished. Users "shoot at" cartoon images of water, toilets, dirt, and other sketches drawn from the artist's dialogue. As a "reward" for shooting the image, we learn more about cholera, the history of the Andes, and the simple cure for cholera shown in short Quicktime movies and texts. The play between such text and the image is ironic and disturbing; as players, we begin to realize how simple education and resources could have changed the trajectory of a whole town's history. Then, after the informative moment, we move on to the next level, which displays a different cartoon image to shoot. Here, a hybrid of game and interactive art techniques is used to subvert computer gaming tropes with political messages."

In the Kaleidoscope Khuritos Infinitos, Grossberger Morales gets her inspiration from Bolivian weavings, particularly Khuritos characters of the underworld in Bolivia. For an exhibit in 2009, Grossberger Morales had Bolivian artisans build a hand-pounded Kaleidoscope with images of Khuritos swirling in the front-surfaced mirror. 

In the last decade, Grossberger Morales has created immersive AR and VR of a fictional desert, Pink Peak, using lenticulars of mathematically generated designs with two to nine flips. Her current research focuses on Machine creativity and personal AI. Grossberger Morales holds a BA in Anthropology and an MS in Instructional Design from the University of Southern California.