According to the famous exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (1968) at MoMA in New York, the 1960s heralded the beginning of a new, cybernetic age. Lillian Schwartz was fascinated by this growing technologi- cal innovation, and despite her traditional training in calligraphy and painting, she began working with engineers and programmers to create new visual experiences. At the MoMA show, the installation Proxima Centauri (1968), made in collaboration with Danish engineer Per Biorn – another member of the E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) group – was a translucent plastic dome that generated shifting red sculptures of light whose dynamic visual configuration varies with the viewer’s position. In the 1970s, after she started working at Bell Labs, the research and development branch of AT&T, Schwartz began to develop a hybrid language that superimposed hand-tinted photos and geometric drawings generated by algorithms to create psychedelic moving images. The brief films she made using this process, like Googolplex, Enigma, or Mis-Takes (all 1972), feature constantly mutating shapes accompanied by driving music, to produce an odd, mystic, almost spiritual sense of disorientation. Despite the revolutionary media and hypnotic, futuristic aesthetic that it employs, Schwartz’s work addresses timeless themes from a high-tech angle.
Stefano Mudu
