Rebecca Allen — The Swimmer and early computer animation

1981

Artists: Rebecca Allen · Year: 1981 · Medium: Computer-animated short — figure rendered with custom body-motion software · Substrate: NYIT CGL custom rendering pipeline; Allen's own motion-animation code; frame-buffer hardware · Place: Long Island, New York, USA · Institution: New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab (NYIT CGL) Rebecca Allen's The Swimmer (1981) and the studies that preceded it were among the first computer animations to render a believable moving human figure. Produced at NYIT CGL during her MFA research — shortly before The Catherine Wheel would make her known to a television audience — the piece depicts a computer-generated swimmer executing a swim stroke across a stylized water surface. The motion was generated not through keyframe animation but through parameterized body dynamics Allen had programmed specifically for the piece. Body-motion animation was an unsolved problem in 1981. The NYIT team had solved much of the rendering side — surfaces, textures, lighting — but making a computer-animated human figure move convincingly was beyond the field's collective capability. Allen's research, which was partly thesis research, was the first sustained attempt at the problem from a practicing artist rather than an engineering team. Her solutions informed the commercial computer-animation practice that developed through the 1980s. Allen went on to Symbolics Graphics and then to long tenure at UCLA's Design Media Arts program, where she has taught since the mid-1990s. Her practice has continued to focus on computer-animated human form — through VR, motion capture, and avatar design — for more than four decades. She is still working. She is one of a very small number of women who were present at the core of NYIT CGL during its 1979–1985 peak, and her work, like Schwartz's and Truckenbrod's before her, has been systematically under-credited in the standard histories of computer animation. Lore Allen's MFA thesis work at MIT (in collaboration with NYIT CGL production) produced both The Swimmer and The Mirror, the work that prompted David Byrne to commission The Catherine Wheel (covered separately). NYIT CGL's staff, under Alexander Schure's patronage, was an unusually productive environment for the period — Catmull, Smith, Blinn, Allen, and others who would shape the subsequent field all worked there within the same decade. Sources • Allen, Rebecca — rebeccaallen.com archive • Smith, Alvy Ray — A Biography of the Pixel (MIT Press, 2021) • UCLA DMA — Allen faculty archive