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.