Oct 17, 2024

CG Animation Pioneer Lillian Schwartz Dies at 97

Lillian Schwartz, a pioneering animator and one of the few people who regularly produced CG animated films in the 1970s, died last Saturday in New York at the age of 97.

Schwartz was already an artist when she was invited to work at AT&T's Bell Labs. Bell Labs was a center for industrial research and scientific development that led to numerous technological breakthroughs in the 20th century, and from the late 1960s she worked there as an artist-in-residence, collaborating with research scientists such as Ken Knowlton to create computer-based animated films and still She created digital art of computer-generated animated films and still images.

Her first film, Pixillation, produced with Nolton's help, was a few lines of computer-generated black and white textures mixed with colored hand animation, and her follow-up, UFOs 1971, was entirely computer generated. Her work was always experimental, and she used a wide variety of techniques, including computer lasers, found objects such as cancer radiation therapy images, computer motion control programs, and various software programs developed at Bell Labs. She was a pioneering multimedia digital artist long before the term “digital artist” existed.

In recent days, numerous obituaries have appeared detailing her life and work, including in The New York Times and Artforum.

On her website, restored versions of many of her works can be seen.