Lillian Schwartz — UFOs and later Bell Labs films

1971

Artists: Lillian Schwartz, Ken Knowlton (technical collaborator) · Year: 1971 · Medium: Computer-generated 16mm film, color · Substrate: BEFLIX / EXPLOR languages; microfilm plotter with color added photographically · Place: Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA · Institution: Bell Telephone Laboratories Pixillation (1970) was Lillian Schwartz's first major film at Bell Labs, but it was far from her last. Across the following decade she produced a steady stream of computer-generated short films: UFOs (1971), Enigma (1972), Olympiad (1971), Googolplex (1972), and many others. The films explored a distinctive visual vocabulary — saturated, graphic, rhythmic — that became recognizable as Schwartz's own across the range of collaborations she pursued with different composers. UFOs (1971) is characteristic. Four minutes of kinetic, color-shifting graphic patterns, the film uses BEFLIX-generated geometric elements in elaborate choreographed sequences against a score by Moog pioneer Morton Subotnick. The film is both a formal study of pattern-perception and an aesthetic object in its own right, and it suggests why Schwartz was, at the moment, the most-seen computer artist in the United States. Her work moved easily between research-conference screenings and art-museum installations because it was, first, visually compelling. What Schwartz's sustained output at Bell Labs through the 1970s demonstrates is that computer animation was not a one-shot medium for experimental filmmakers but a medium artists could inhabit continuously. She produced roughly a film a year for fifteen years from 1970 onward, and the cumulative body of work is one of the largest individual contributions to computer animation of the period. The MoMA holding of her films is the most complete public archive. Lore Schwartz worked closely with a series of composers — Subotnick, Gershon Kingsley, Max Mathews, Emmanuel Ghent — who scored her films using the Bell Labs computer-music tools that Max Mathews had developed. The collaborations were symbiotic: the films were designed with the music in mind, and the music was composed to the visual rhythms Schwartz had established. This level of integration between computer-generated image and computer-generated music was unusual for the period and remains one of the distinctive features of Schwartz's output. Sources • Museum of Modern Art — Lillian Schwartz collection • Schwartz, Lillian — The Computer Artist's Handbook (Norton, 1992) • Bell Labs Technical Memoranda