https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/technology/lillian-schwartz-dead.html
"Lillian Schwartz, who was one of the first artists to use the computer to make
films and who helped bring together the artistic, scientific and technology
communities in the 1970s by providing a glimpse of the possibilities at the
intersections of those fields, died on Saturday at her home in Manhattan. She
was 97.
Her son Laurens Schwartz confirmed the death.
Ms. Schwartz was a restless, experiential artist who spent her early career
bouncing among mediums like watercolors, acrylics and sculptures, often
layering one on top of another and incorporating disparate, sometimes unlikely,
materials.
The computer became her medium of choice after she was invited to join Bell
Labs in the late 1960s as a resident visitor, a kind of artist in residence.
With the help of colleagues there, Ms. Schwartz created some of the first films
to incorporate computer-generated images, using photo filters, paint, lasers
and discarded footage from science films, among other elements.
Her seminal work was done years before computers were controlled using the
kinds of graphic user interfaces that are now central to the personal computer.
To make her first film, the four-minute “Pixillation” (1970), for example — a
project that took two months — she fed punch cards into an IBM 7094 mainframe
computer to produce 85 black-and-white frames on magnetic tape.
She then reproduced the tape on film using a microfilm recorder, enhanced with
color filters, and layered in elements like drawings and footage she had taken
of paint being poured onto glass. The final film was viewed using a projector,
not a computer.
“I had to push the early machine and cajole scientists to make the computer an
art tool,” Ms. Schwartz wrote in “The Computer Artist’s Handbook” (1992), which
she wrote with her son Laurens, an artist. “Initially, I was satisfied when I
pushed the machine into serving as a brush, an ink block, and oil paint. But
the machine had to keep pace with me — just as I learned that I had to grow
with the machine as its scientifically oriented powers evolved.”"
Via Bill Daul.
RIP,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
