On October 12, trailblazing computer artist Lillian Schwartz died at the age of ninety-seven. An early resident artist at Bell Labs, Schwartz created some of the first films to incorporate computer graphics—such as the revolutionary Pixillation, 1970, and UFOs, 1971—and, over the course of her multi-decade career, innovated tirelessly with engineers and scientists to discover imaginative, often-prescient points of contact between technology and the visual arts.
 
“Schwartz collaborated with visual perception specialists, physicists, and information theorists, transforming scientific experiments into art,” wrote Rebekah Rutkoff in an essay on the artist in Artforum’s October 2016 issue. “Her experimental approach was fed by a keen capacity to twist new technologies against the grain of intended use and a multilingual mind at ease shuttling between scientific precision, abstract thought, and visionary foresight.” —The editors

“In this Artforum Dossier, we have gathered texts that focus on artistic practices that reflexively engage with the specific materiality of celluloid—the transparent plastic that served as the most common substrate for moving images before the advent of analog and digital video. These practices typically focus less on storytelling than on the aesthetic possibilities of directly manipulating celluloid film stock, creating sequences of celluloid film frames, or running celluloid film strips through projectors. The results usually emphasize our perceptual experience of light, color, sound, pattern, movement, and space—that is, those elements that provide the language of all moving-image experiences.”
—Tina Rivers Ryan