Lillian Schwartz - Career

Career

By 1966, Schwartz had begun working with light boxes and mechanical devices like pumps, and she became a member of the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) group that brought together artists and engineers as collaborators. In 1968 her kinetic sculpture Proxima Centauri was included in the important early show of machine art at the New York Museum of Modern Art entitled "The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age." This sculpture was later used as a special effect for a Star Trek episode, in which it served as a prison for Spock's brain.

Schwartz was brought into Bell Labs in 1968 by Leon Harmon; while there, she worked with engineers John Vollaro, Ken Knowlton and others. She took classes in programming at the New School for Social Research around the same time. She began making paintings and films with a combination of hand painting, digital collaging, computer processing, and optical post-processing using such early programs as BEFLIX, EXPLOR, and SYMBOLICS. Many of the works she created in this period by creative cobbling together of different, often cutting-edge technologies prefigure what would be done with such programs as Photoshop and Final Cut Pro a quarter century later. As a result of this experimentation, Schwartz made one of the first digitally created films to be shown as a work of art, Pixillation, which shows red squares, cones, pyramids and other geometic shapes on black-and-white backgrounds.

Read more about this topic:  Lillian Schwartz

Famous quotes containing the word career:

    Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.
    Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964)

    I began my editorial career with the presidency of Mr. Adams, and my principal object was to render his administration all the assistance in my power. I flattered myself with the hope of accompanying him through [his] voyage, and of partaking in a trifling degree, of the glory of the enterprise; but he suddenly tacked about, and I could follow him no longer. I therefore waited for the first opportunity to haul down my sails.
    William Cobbett (1762–1835)

    Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.
    Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)