Lillian Schwartz — Pixillation

1970

Artists: Lillian Schwartz, Ken Knowlton · Year: 1970 · Medium: Computer-generated 16mm film, color · Substrate: EXPLOR / BEFLIX languages (Knowlton), microfilm plotter, IBM mainframe · Place: Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA · Institution: Bell Telephone Laboratories Lillian Schwartz's Pixillation (1970) is a four-minute computer-animated film made at Bell Labs in collaboration with the computer scientist Ken Knowlton, with a score by the composer Gershon Kingsley. It premiered at the 34th Venice Biennale, where it was one of the first computer-generated films to be shown at any international contemporary-art biennale, and subsequently won the 1970 Zagreb Festival Grand Prix for animation. The film's title plays on both "pixel" and "pixilated" (the folkloric-English word meaning enchanted or touched), and the content is a rapid-fire sequence of color-field compositions generated by Knowlton's EXPLOR language, edited by Schwartz into a driving rhythmic structure that hits the eye as much as the ear. Schwartz had arrived at Bell Labs in 1968 through an unusual route: a sculptor and painter in her mid-forties, she had visited the lab to see an early Knowlton–Harmon collaboration, been offered the chance to stay and work, and had accepted — becoming, over the subsequent two decades, one of the two artists-in-residence Bell Labs supported continuously (the other being Stan VanDerBeek). Knowlton was her primary collaborator; he wrote the EXPLOR language specifically so that artists without programming backgrounds could specify color-region compositions procedurally. Pixillation matters in this archive for a reason beyond its prize-winning premiere. It is the earliest film in which the artist was not the programmer: Schwartz specified the visual logic, Knowlton translated it into EXPLOR, the IBM 360 rendered the frames onto microfilm, Schwartz edited the frames in a conventional editing suite, and the final film was the product of both of them. This division of labor — artist as visual director, engineer as implementation partner — became the template for essentially every subsequent artist-engineer collaboration in this archive. Schwartz continued to make computer art for the next thirty-five years, producing dozens of films and writing the 1992 Computer Artist's Handbook (with her son Laurens Schwartz), one of the first practical textbooks in the field. Lore Schwartz was invited to Bell Labs more or less by accident. She had been at an exhibition of Knowlton and Leon Harmon's work at the Howard Wise Gallery in 1967 and had asked Knowlton technical questions about the production; Knowlton invited her to visit the Murray Hill labs, and she turned up with a portfolio of sculpture. The lab's director, Peter Denes, offered her an artist-residence on the spot. She had no programming training; she learned EXPLOR from Knowlton. She often worked night-shifts, when the IBM 360 was less contested, and would bring her kids to the lab on Saturdays so they could watch the microfilm plotter chatter out the frames. She maintained working relationships with Knowlton, Max Mathews, and the rest of the Bell Labs team for decades after she had formally left the lab. The original 16mm negative of Pixillation lives in the AT&T archives; a restored digital transfer is held by the MoMA. Sources • Schwartz, Lillian F.; Schwartz, Laurens R. — The Computer Artist's Handbook (Norton, 1992). • Museum of Modern Art — Pixillation (1970) collection entry. • Bell Labs / AT&T Archives — Lillian Schwartz correspondence and production files.