Born in 1927 and regarded as a pioneer of computer-generated art, American artist Lillian Schwartz has died aged 97. Best known for expanding the use of technology in artistic expression, Lillian became one of the first American artists to use computer coding languages to create motion graphics for film and video art.

Shortly after working as a nurse in wartime Japan, Ms. Schwartz began her artistic education by studying Chinese brushwork under Tshiro. Later, in the 1960s she switched to kinetic art and became an active member of the New York art Scene, taking part in the exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age at the Museum of Modern Art in 1968. It was her kinetic light sculpture Proxima Centuraui, which attracted the attention of Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton, researchers at Bell Laboratories. This led to Ms Schwartz to work as the only woman and artist among scientists at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey from 1968 to 2001, becoming an artist in residence.

During her time at Bell Laboratories, she made a series of abstract films exploring the formal potentialities of a technology whose language, still experimental at the time, offered unprecedented perspectives on the emergence of a new visual paradigm. Her film Pixillation defines the aesthetic of 1970s computer art, with its vibrant colours and geometric forms. Schwartz wrote lines of code to generate a black and white texture, which she then enhanced with hand-coloured animations. She edited the film to create an interplay between the colours of the digital and analogue shapes across various frames, resulting in a mesmerising shifting effect. The soundtrack, written and performed by Gershon Kingsley on a Moog synthesizer, increases in tempo as the film cuts from digital to analogue imagery at a faster pace, building a sense of urgency.

Ms Schwartz resisted labels and referred to herself in numerous creative ways, calling herself a pixelate, a computer detective and even a technological fruit picker. These inventive names are reflected by her status as a pioneer in the fusion of technology and art by transforming the computer into an artistic tool, rather than just a machine. She told the New York Times, “I’m using the technology of today because it says what’s going on in society today. Ignoring the computer would be ignoring a large part of our world.”, demonstrating her belief that computers could help reveal the complexities of the modern world.

During her digital explorations, Ms. Schwartz developed a new theory about Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, claiming that her digital analysis proved that da Vinci had used his own likeness as the model for the iconic painting. This exemplifies how Schwartz pushed boundaries of creativity and delved into the creative process itself. By applying these digital forensics to the Mona Lisa, she sparked new debates about Da Vinci’s methods.

Recently, Lillian Schwartz has become more widely recognised for her achievements. To name a few, she had her first first solo gallery show at Magenta Plains at aged 89 and in 2021 she was made a fellow of the Computer History Museum in recognition of her groundbreaking efforts at the intersection of computers and art.

Although later in her career, Lillian has finally received the credit she deserves for her lasting influence on both art and technology and her impact on a new generation of digital artists.