Lillian F. Schwartz pioneered the use of different types of computers and original peripherals in art, animation, optical, effects, kinetics, perception, and analysis. Her mind was never constrained by impossibilities since she endured two Great Depressions, polio in post-war Japan (where in forcing herself from paralysis to movement she learned fine brush-stroking techniques), and work in a male, science-bred organization.
Fukuoka: Fragments of bodies had been burned by the Bombs into sides of buildings and many retained the shape of a human once 3-dimensional and now one, flat, singular, person-building, silent.
Polio: It’s impossible. She’s not supposed to move.
What mattered was pushing boundaries and not believing the obstacles arranged by others.
She went to New York, The Happenings, Dali at the St. Regis with the Warhol group, E.A.T. and boisterous Billy Kluver and Rauschenberg’s brownstone with the slow-moving tortoise. She collected garbage in the Bowery; plastic balls north of Canal; motors. In 1968 she used her doctor-husband’s X-ray light boxes and painted acrylics that she laminated and placed over the fluorescent tubes. One example is “Prisoner” (Columbia U. Collection.)
She befriended the president of a plastics’ factory and had him remove the chemicals that prevented the formation of bubbles. She constructed sculptures, eventually kinetic, and then her most complex piece to that date, Proxima Centauri. It catapulted her to MOMA’s “the machine as seen at the end of the mechanical age,” Christmas, 1968. Leon Harmon, an expert in visual perception at Bell Labs, asked her to drop by and that visit did not end until the demise of the Labs.
The Labs embodied experimentation, foresight, a breeding ground for Nobelists. Lillian took courses in programming to manipulate the virgin digital palette and its scientifically-oriented monitors and peripherals. While waiting for magnetic tapes to record data from her punched cards to be calculated in the late 1960’s, Lillian wandered hallways poking her head into rooms and entering if something looked intriguing. Scientists eventually realized that what she wanted – complete control over pixels from machine to monitor to film – also enhanced their ability to work.
From using lasers to etch art into gold circuit boards, to the first digital portrait, first animated running man with physiognomically correct joints (as opposed to the rotoscoping used up to then), first editing technique (1971) by adding or inserting solid black frames to maintain the illusion that the colors retained their saturation as well as change perception and provoke auras in patients
with epilepsy to help in the control of a seizure, or eliminate strabismus in some sufferers of crossed eyes while watching the film
U.F.O.s, or the black and white film “Googleplex”, where the white appeared silver. (MOMA and AT&T Collection.)
She branched into art, archaeological analyses and electronic restoration. In 1984 and ’85 she worked with Richard Voss at IBM’s
Thomas J. Watson research center to input part of MOMA’s art collection and the architecture of the new building, using teraflops
of power to scan in sculpture, paintings, graphics, frames from films by famous artists while maintaining perspective and color. The result in 1985 was the creation of the first computer-generated Public Service Announcement and was the first PSA in this medium to win an Emmy. The PSA was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art for the opening of the newly renovated MOMA .
With one AI machine at the Labs, the Symbolics, she duplicated lists of palettes of famous artists and lists of how they moved, worked. With Unix-based machines, she proved indisputably that Leonardo used himself as the final model for the Mona Lisa. She solved the 500 year-old puzzle of the perspective construction for Leonardo’s “Last Supper”. Schwartz now has the Last Supper work in Virtual Reality, allowing the viewer to move around the simulated refectory at Santa Maria delle Grazie to view the fresco as Leonardo intended.
AMONG THE OTHER FIRSTS WITH WHICH SHE IS GENERALLY CREDITED ARE:
1968-‘80’s.
Established the computer as a medium for artistic expression in graphics, film/video, special effects and solving other controversies in art analysis and electronic art restoration.