We mark the loss of Lilian Schwartz this week at age 97. She’ll be remembered for her impact on the craft of artmaking with computers and her vision for how to push human skill in digital media. And you can dive deep into her work online; here’s a set of links.
Maybe that’s why, even almost a century later, Schwartz is having a moment. Computers again threaten to be dominated by automation – again, the domain of dehumanization and military-industrial economies. Schwartz would boast about layers upon layers of painstaking personal labor, comparing pixels to oil and canvas. And her work at Bell Labs was part of a generation that helped wrest the young computer industry from the grips of big institutions and treat it as a tool for expressive freedom and mass access.
Schwartz’s name also frequently comes up as a singular source of inspiration for many, many folks in the field – far from Bell, in every corner I know in the globe. And when we say Bell Labs, we mean a long stint at Bell Labs – she was a “resident visitor” from 1968 – 2002. On top of it, she was the first prominent case of use of computer analysis in art – solving the mystery of the “real” Mona Lisa (very, very, speculatively anyway – it’s like a Da Vinci Code for proper computer geeks).
Schwartz was instrumental in forging the idea of artistic-technological collaborations, and helping the nascent medium find acceptance in the high art world. From Carsten Nicolai to Beeple, a lot of the value of digital art now owes some thanks to her legacy.
“I just fell in love with the computer,” she told Eyeo festival in 2014. “I was taught machine language, which I thought was rather neat,” she says, confessing she preferred it to FORTRAN. “I sort of loved zeros and ones for a long time!”
Jer Thorp visited her in 2014 while producing the interview, and writes more:
For a glimpse further back, Larry Keating made this exceptional film in 1976 for AT&T. And it’s stunning hearing her talk about emotion. (Also, groovy theme song.)
The New York Times has a great obituary, focusing in particular on the collage-like approach she applied – one that mixed digital tools in the same way visual artists mix materials. After “bouncing among mediums like watercolors, acrylics and sculptures, often layering one on top of another and incorporating disparate, sometimes unlikely, materials,” writes Chris Kornelis, she took a similar approach to the machine: “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.”
That resonates with me, as a lot of artists of my generation and younger generations I admire most have a similarly mixed approach – especially after so much austerity and minimalism sometimes holding the field back.
As Gina Choy notes, Schwartz even found her unique vision partly by adapting to what others might term vision loss: “In 1955, Schwartz was diagnosed with chorioretinitis, a type of inflammation in the eye’s retina that leaves scar tissue behind; Schwartz took the disruption this condition had on her vision and was inspired to translate her unique perception into art.” That’s fascinating to me, as there are similar incidents in music where artists found ways of using adaptation to further their work rather than end it: think of the car accident that afflicted Les Paul or the fact that Clara Rockmore first became interested in the Theremin after injury stopped her from continuing violin.
Watch the films on the official lillian.com site. For instance:
The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn was gifted a big collection of hers. It’s great to think of the Dearborn (and Detroit) community having access to this, and future artists who might take her work in new directions. Hyperallergic covered the archive acquisition in 2022, with a story serving both as a nice tour of the materials and a retrospective of her life and work:
Early Digital Art History | The Letter (& Artwork) that started Lillian Schwartz's Career
'Proxima Centauri' (1968) by Lillian Schwartz
"With the opening at MoMA Leon Harmon from Bell Labs, was there…He was fascinated with my work…That was my opening to Bell Laboratories."… pic.twitter.com/5iubsXAYMR
A Deep Dive into U.F.O.'s (1971) by Lillian F. Schwartz
Her second commission for AT&T, the work used alpha rhythms & eye refresh rates to maximize color saturation – resulting in optical illusions & afterimages that aren’t present on the physical film.
We see higher when we stand atop one another’s shoulders. So we’re indebted to Lillian Schwartz in pushing human perception and skill with machines, when machine art makes us more human.
