Lillian Schwartz, Pioneering CG Animation Filmmaker, Dies At 97

Lillian Schwartz, a trailblazing animator who was among the handful of people to regularly make cg-animated films in the 1970s, passed away last Saturday in New York City at the age of 97.

Schwartz was already a practicing artist when she was invited to join AT&T’s Bell Labs, an industrial research and scientific development hub that is credited with an abundance of technological breakthroughs during the 20th century. Beginning in the late 1960s, she worked there as an artist in residence and collaborated with research scientists like Ken Knowlton to create animated films and still digital art with a computer.

Her first film, Pixillation, made with the assistance of Knowlton, was created with a few lines of computer-generated black and white texture that she intermixed with colored hand animation, and her follow-up film, UFOs 1971, was entirely computer generated. Her films were always experimental and used a wide variety of techniques including computer lasers, found materials like cancer radiation treatment images, computer motion-control programs, and various software programs developed at Bell Labs. She was a pioneering multimedia digital artist, long before the term ever existed.

Numerous obituaries with details on her life and work have been published in the last few days, including in The New York Times and Artforum.

Restored versions of many of her films can be seen on her website.