Lillian Schwartz

I came across this article about Lilian Schwartz recently, which gives me a great springboard to talk about how the history of these things goes back a lot further than we sometimes assume. She was making films out of computer-generated imagery in 1976., and before that was making machine art.

Some of her projects would fit right in with a gallery of Processing projects, except she did it with machine language and FORTRAN.

There have been a lot of people experimenting with this stuff: Schwartz wasn’t the first. Some of them influenced other people who in turn influenced the works we see today, but the early history of art and computers is not very well known. Fortunately, there are people actively researching it–and some of the original artists are still around.