Lillian Schwartz

Drawing on rare performances, interviews, animations, and experimental film, this documentary surveys the formative years of electronic music from 1948 to 1980. Featuring pioneering composers and inventors—including Milton Babbitt and Leon Theremin—the film explores the experimental technologies, academic laboratories, and creative struggles that shaped the early evolution of electronic sound.

A tortuous journey, in the company of the Spanish painter Salvador Dalí, around the figure of the enigmatic and visionary French poet Raymond Roussel (1877-1933).

An illusion of 3 dimensions is achieved by a blending of mathematics and physics to carry the spectator through a new range of audio and visual dynamics.

Picture-processed photos from the artist-filmmaker’s family. Faces are abstracted in a divisionistic manner.

Schwartz reordered and combined angular contours, broken planes, and distorted proportions in her own pictorial structures in an homage to Picasso's style.

Extended editing techniques based on Land’s experiments affect the viewer’s sensory perceptions.

Drawing on rare performances, interviews, animations, and experimental film, this documentary surveys the formative years of electronic music from 1948 to 1980. Featuring pioneering composers and inventors—including Milton Babbitt and Leon Theremin—the film explores the experimental technologies, academic laboratories, and creative struggles that shaped the early evolution of electronic sound.

An illusion of 3 dimensions is achieved by a blending of mathematics and physics to carry the spectator through a new range of audio and visual dynamics.

Picture-processed photos from the artist-filmmaker’s family. Faces are abstracted in a divisionistic manner.

Schwartz reordered and combined angular contours, broken planes, and distorted proportions in her own pictorial structures in an homage to Picasso's style.

Extended editing techniques based on Land’s experiments affect the viewer’s sensory perceptions.

Pablo Neruda’s life unfolds and becomes the basis for the symbolic representation of his poem “Barcarola”, intermixing live action, still footage, computer images, dance and poetry.

Pablo Neruda’s life unfolds and becomes the basis for the symbolic representation of his poem “Barcarola”, intermixing live action, still footage, computer images, dance and poetry.

Changing parameters on mathematical equations.

Blasting off into cosmic visual abstraction, pioneering computer artist Lillian Schwartz’s UFOs is a kinetic tour-de-force whose innovative pixel pigmentation showcased advanced stereoscopic technology as art.

Created in 1990 at AT&T's Bell Labs in a program called Sculpt, one of the very first real-time texture mapping programs.

Slow disintegration and aging of artists head, revealing underlying bone structure. Created using old picture-phone technology. New music added in 2013.

A single bird in flight is transformed, enhanced and interpreted so as to present a unique visual experience. From its original inception in a 128 frame black-and-white sequence it evolves by programmed reflection, inversion, magnification, color transformation and time distortion into the final restructured film as art.

Pixillation features computer generated abstract animations set to Moog-synthesized sound.

This animation can be watched in 2D or using Chromadepth Glasses in 3D.

Music by Albert E. Miller. Experimental work with dancer and musicians to combine and present an unusual choreography of performers and music as a unified force.

Music by Albert E. Miller. Combination of musicians and dancers in free form movements captured by computer-controlled-video which permits distortions and variations of the imagery. Continued experimentation with Rock Music and performers.

This film is strongly rooted in its underlying mathematical structure which forms the basis for the images. The music by Jean Claude Risset is integral to the creation of this concert of space and time.

“Schwartz’ METAMORPHOSIS is a complex study of evolving lines, planes, and circles, all moving at different speeds, and resulting in subtle color changes. The only computer-generated work on the program, it transcends what many of us have come to expect of such film with its subtle variations and significant use of color.” – Catherine Egan

Computer generated music and visuals films directly from a color TV monitor.

Music performed by The New York Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted by Pierre Boulez. Schwartz manipulates by computer, in real-time the images of the Maestro to realize a unity between his music and the picture.

A short Emmy award-winning animation promoting New York's newly renovated Museum of Modern Art.

Music “Quartet in F” by Maurice Ravel, performed by Max Mathews. Subtly colored images combining microphotography and computer generated images with unique editing sequences that propel the viewer into a spiral-like endless vortex. Three music tracks were produced by the Groove System – a computer-controlled sound synthesizer.

“The changing dots, ectoplasmic shapes and electronic music of L. Schwartz’s ‘Mutations’ which has been shot with the aid of computers and lasers, makes for an eye-catching view of the potentials of the new techniques.” – A. H. Weiler, N. Y. Times

“Lines and rectangles are the geometric shapes basic to ENIGMA, a computer graphics film full of subliminal and persistent image effects. In a staccato rhythm, the film builds to a climax by instantly replacing one set of shapes with another, each set either changing in composition and color or remaining for a moment to vibrate strobiscopically and then change.” – The Booklist.

This animation can be watched in 2D or using Chromadepth Glasses in 3D.

This animation can be watched in 2D or using Chromadepth Glasses in 3D.

A number of telephones from the very first invention by Alexander Graham Bell to the present-day cellular and voice phones are morphed in an inventive choreographic video.

A number of telephones from the very first invention by Alexander Graham Bell to the present-day cellular and voice phones are morphed in an inventive choreographic video.

This animation can be watched in 2D or using Chromadepth Glasses in 3D.

This animation can be watched in 2D or using Chromadepth Glasses in 3D.

This tape combines live-images filmed in the Yucatan with output from the Paik video-synthesizer ribboned with computer-generated images.

Musicians and dancer perform in real-time while Schwartz plays a computer-keyboard to create special effects on a computer-controlled video-visual communication system.

“Apotheosis, which is developed from images made in the radiation treatment of human cancer, is the most beautiful and the most subtly textured work in computer animation I have seen.” – Roger Greenspun, N. Y. Times Award Foothills-1973.

A dance by bodies of shifting colors.

A colorful collage, with a subtle ecology theme, made largely from footage from trial runs of programs used for many of the other films.

This animation can be watched in 2D or using Chromadepth Glasses in 3D.

This animation can be watched in 2D or using Chromadepth Glasses in 3D.

This animation can be watched in 2D or using Chromadepth Glasses in 3D.

A playful concoction of computer produced images, a few hand-animated scenes and shots of lab equipment. Made largely from left-overs from scientific research.

Beginning with footage of sea birds in flight, the film image is then optically scanned and transformed by the computer. The geometric overlay on live random motion has the effect of creating new depth, a third dimension. Our perception of the birds’ forms and movements is heightened by the abstract pattern outlining them.