Trailblazing computer artist Lillian Schwartz, whose jittery, color-saturated, digital films burst onto screens at a time when computers were still massive mainframes laboriously programmed with punch cards, died on October 12 at her home in Manhattan. She was ninety-seven. Working in her capacity as resident artist at Bell Labs long before the advent of sophisticated and plentiful graphic software, Schwartz set vividly hued pixels vibrating in eye-wateringly psychedelic works that presaged not only the widespread use of design software in the fields of art and publishing but the rise of CGI. As Nobel laureate and Bell Labs research chief Arno Penzias once said, “What we know as computer art began on a December morning in 1968 when Lillian Schwartz grasped a light pen and began to draw.”
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GARY INDIANA (1950–2024)
Lillian Feldman was born to impecunious Jewish emigres in Cincinnati on July 13, 1927, the twelfth of thirteen children who were encouraged by their mother to draw on the walls. By the time she was thirteen, six of her siblings and her father had died, and she was helping to support her family by working part-time in a Newport, Kentucky, dress shop. At sixteen, with World War II raging across the Atlantic, she learned from her brother that she could get a free college education if she agreed to sign on as a US nurse cadet for two years. Lying about her age, she enrolled in the University of Cincinnati College of Nursing and Health and soon learned that she was far too squeamish to pursue a medical career. “The only thing I was good at was doing sketches on casts for the kids in the hospital,” she told the New York Times in 1975.
While working at a pharmacy, she met a young doctor named Jack Schwartz, whom she married, joining him at his station in US-occupied Japan in 1948. Within a year, she contracted polio, becoming paralyzed from the waist down and losing the use of her right arm. The paralysis would prove temporary, but while its symptoms endured, she studied calligraphy and meditation with a Zen Buddhist teacher. “I learned to paint in my mind before putting one stroke on paper,” she later recalled, naming the experience as the catalyst that set her on the path to digital filmmaking, as she was able to imagine the entire work unspooling before her.
By now the mother of two young boys, she returned with her family to the US, where they settled in Saint Louis before moving to New Jersey. Schwartz began studying art, experimenting in mediums including acrylic and watercolors, frequently mixing these with such unusual materials as sand or found objects. Prone to collecting detritus, she started incorporating discarded materials into sculptures, which in the mid-1960s took on kinetic properties. Her growing interest in the technology led her to attend the New York loft meetings of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), an organization founded by Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver and aimed at promoting collaborations between artists, engineers, and scientists.
In 1968, working with engineer Per Biorn, she created the kinetic sculpture Proxima Centauri, which was one of nine E.A.T.-affiliated works chosen by curator Pontus Hultén for his landmark exhibition “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, that same year. Incorporating a sewing machine motor and colored lights, the sculpture appeared to viewers as a translucent dome across which abstract images flickered, and whose retraction into a black plastic cabinet visitors could trigger by stepping on a nearby pressure-sensitive pad.
The work (which later appeared in a Star Trek episode as a prison for the brain of the human-Vulcan character Spock) garnered the attention of Bell Labs staffers Leon Harmon and Kenneth Knowlton, whose E.A.T.-sponsored work had also been chosen for the show, and Harmon in 1969 invited Schwartz to visit the labs, which served as the research arm of communications giant AT&T. Within a week, she had been invited to work there as a “resident visitor.” In 1970, she finished her first work within the labs’ confines, a four-minute film commissioned by AT&T and titled Pixillation, which she made over the course of two months using computer-generated graphics achieved through punch-card programming, in addition to drawings and footage of paint dripping onto glass. Her next film, 1971’s UFOs, was wholly computer generated, a stroboscopic firestorm of shifting forms accompanied by an unsettling score that at times recalled the sound of an infant banging on a xylophone or water rushing down a drain.
Schwartz, who described her work as “technological pointillism,” would stay at Bell Labs through 2002 (“I never said, ‘Thank God it’s Friday,’” she told the Computer History Museum in a 2013 oral history interview), collaborating with composers including Milton Babbitt, Max Mathews, Jean-Claude Risset, and Vladimir Ussachevsky. In 1985, she won an Emmy for “Big MOMA,” a thirty-second computer-generated PSA she was commissioned to create to mark the reopening of the newly renovated MoMA. The following year, she gained national attention with her theory that Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was actually a self-portrait. The postulate, which she came up with while testing Gerard J. Holzmann’s seminal digital photo editing program Pico and merging a self-portrait by Leonardo with the famed 1503 oil painting, also earned her the notice of Bell Labs bigwigs, who were shocked to learn she was not in the company’s directory and swiftly contracted her to a paid position as a computer graphics consultant. In 1992, with her artist son Laurens (who survives her, along with another son, Jeffrey), she coauthored The Computer Artist’s Handbook, a volume aimed at making the production of computer art accessible to laypeople, newly empowered by the wide availability of personal computers. She worked as a consultant to various companies, including Exxon, IBM, and Lucent.
Despite her many estimable contributions to the field of computer-mediated art, Schwartz did not achieve real renown in the art world until late in her life, receiving her first solo exhibition in 2016, at Magenta Plains in New York. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, all in New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; and the Centre Pompidou and the Grand Palais Museum, both in Paris. Her archive is held in the collection of the Henry Ford Museum.
Writing in the pages of Artforum in 2016, Rebekah Rutkoff posited that Schwartz chose the computer as her artmaking tool because she “needed a medium that could keep pace with the sheer speed of her mind.” Schwartz, who near the end of her life continued to embrace technology as a creative means but lamented the ubiquity of the smartphone’s use as an attention-extraction device, was not only keen but prescient.
“Creating something for humanity that is beautiful is a marvelous way to use the computer,” she told the New York Times in 1975, “which can be a dangerous tool when it’s used to keep track of people and what they’re doing.”