This collection, then called simply Copy Art, inaugurated the International Museum of Electrography in May 1990, thanks to donations from important international public and private collections, among which the works from the I International Biennial of Copy Art organized by the Taller-Galería Fort of Barcelona, in 1984, and the II International Biennial of Electrography and Copy Art, organized by the Valencia City Council, in 1988.
Currently, MIDECIANT preserves a large number of physical pieces made with electrophotographic reproduction machines, technologies and processes, which were popularly called xerocopies, and, later, photocopies, when, starting in the 1980s, the Xerox company lost the monopoly of the patent for the exploitation of these mass reproduction procedures.
The works in the collection cover the entire period of Copy Art production, from the 1960s until photocopiers were replaced by digital printers as peripherals for personal computers, at the end of the 20th century. Included are processes and techniques that artists experimented with and developed around the use, or reflection, of these new graphic multi-reproduction technologies.
Traditional photocopiers evolved technologically in such a way that they digitized their functional processes and were connected to computers, fulfilling the functions of high-quality input (scanner) and output (printers) peripherals.
The MIDECIANT spaces, at the beginning of the 90s, which were then sponsored and financed by companies as important as Canon, Apple or Epson, expanded their technological and instrumental resources. The result was the expansion of the art and new media heritage of the museum-innovation center towards these new artistic practices, which led, over time, to the generation of a new specific collection dedicated to digital graphics.
Today, this collection includes, in addition to a large number of works of analog copy art and fax art, more than 400 digital works made using all machines that were invented and marketed, and carried out through the innovative graphic-technical processes developed by the artists who passed through its spaces, and to which other works and documentary materials from private donations and public and private institutions have been added.
This collection clearly explains the evolution of art and its gradual transformation from the analogue to the digital sphere.