Blog 09 – Women and Non-Binary Practitioners in Computational Art – srauch

For my piece, I picked ENIGMA, a computer-generated film created by Lillian Schwartz in 1972. 

1972 “ENIGMA” – 4 min. 20 sec.

Schwartz worked out of Bell Labs’ Acoustical and Behavioral Research Center from 1968 to 2002, and during her time there, she created a series of videos that were visual output of computer algorithms, ENIGMA being one of them.

What I find so remarkable about her videos is that they were algorithmically generated, but because of the technology at the time, they were physically produced. Each frame the computer output had to be burned into 35mm film one at a time, and then the film itself had to be developed before Schwartz could see the image. Schwartz fluently used the kind of creative thinking afforded by computer-generated art decades before such computational art was accessible or even necessarily made sense to make, allowing her to produce art that is completely unlike anything else being made at the time. As she said in an interview, “I’ve always been interested in what different media could provide me in terms of creating something that had never been seen before or provoke me to create in ways I had not created before.” 

Her work prompts me to think about how art can inspire technology. Art is perhaps an excellent place for an algorithm or computer program to begin its life, because there isn’t initially an expectation that it’s perfect or exactly efficient. Freed from the initial constraints of functionality, new creative ideas can flow and grow, and by the time the program is being translated into the practical realm, it’s become something completely new.