What we now know as computer art began in December 1968, when Lillian Schwartz grasped a light pen and began to draw. Those who worked with her in those days still remember her monumental ingratitude to technology. As each problem was solved and each new capability came into hand, a new round of probing explorations would begin and off she would be, asking for the impossible all over again. In 1976 she used computer-controlled video images to create "On-Line" a punchy portrayal of a rock group's music, blended with the sound and music movement of a dancing vocalist. It was different enough from anything that she, or anyone else, had done to be in a category by itself, to which she attached a simple but enduring name. In the list of Lillian Schwartz's films for 1976, one can find the laconic description: "`On-Line', 10-min. rock video."

Over the years, her film and video work has won a number of awards. The special effects she did for "Lathe of Heaven" earned the film an Oscar in 1980. In 1985, her computer-generated commercial for the opening of the rebuilt Museum of Modern Art won an Emmy. The MOMA commercial was part of a project she undertook at the Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratories with IBM's Richard Voss. She was commissioned by the museum to create a computer-generated poster for its new opening. Once the project was in hand, the presence of a much earlier computer graphic in the museum's collection was "discovered," a 1972 "silkscreen" by Lillian Schwartz. At the time of the silkscreen acquisition, computer art wasn't an acceptable category.

Insatiably curious, she turned her computer into an analytic tool, "taking apart" great paintings to study their structure, composition and handling of colors. The works of Matisse and Picasso were among the first to be studied in this way. In adding Leonardo da Vinci to her list, she provided new insights into the perspective of his Last Supper and, remarkably, provided a persuasively ingenious answer to the identity of the enigmatic Mona Lisa. In addition to her versatile use of technology to create new art forms, her work in traditional media is recognized for its artistic success. Her paintings, graphics and sculpture, as well as her films, are included in the permanent collections of most of the world's major museums.

In my first years at The Museum of Modern Art, I wished to ally video with other new technologies. An exhibition I organized in 1975 featured the use of computers in a video production. Schwartz's work in that show, Mayan (1974), combined geometric designs with prerecorded footage `colorized' with the Paik/Abe analog synthesizer. The device allowed her to mix images `live' with the same flexibility that audio engineers have in the sound studio. Schwartz's kinetic sculpture Proxima Centauri had a return engagement in 1987 in the exhibition `Digital Visions: Computers and Art,' organized by the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse and sponsored by IBM. By this time, the sculpture had been computerized. Infrared heat sensors now detected the approach of a visitor, and computer-generated images replaced the original hand painted slides within the globe. The kinetic sculpture appeared in the show as a venerable computer artwork. Many other exhibited works had a similarly tenuous relationship to computers. Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, and Jennifer Bartlett facilely translated their signature painting styles to computer-generated prints...

Another of Schwartz's pieces in `Digital Visions,' It Is I [Mona-Leo] (1987), could only have been realized with a computer. She split the faces of the Mona Lisa and Leonardo's self-portrait down the middle, adjusting the sizes and juxtaposing them so that one side of Mona Lisa's face matched Leonardo's. The two halves form an arresting portrait of a remarkable split personality - the union of a beautiful woman and a bearded man. The portrait found another venue in a recent issue of Scientific American. In an article on applications of computer art, Schwartz chronicles the evolution of the `splitface' from a study in composition to a convincing argument that the Mona Lisa is based on Leonardo's self-portrait. Leonardo, the archetypal Renaissance polymath, is still with us uniting science and art. Schwartz's oeuvre follows closely the development of the computer. She has combined her dual careers - as a computer artist and a technologist - in a unique manner. She calls herself a `morphodynamacist,' a neologism whose etymological meaning is in accordance with the changing shape of our times."

"The computer is a polymorph of tools and electronic databases. A computer can isolate and conjoin, expand and limit, remember and forget, tempt and deny. A computer can have (be!) an unlimited supply of brushes, colors, textures, shadings, and rules of perspective and three-dimensional geometry. It can be used to design a work of art or to control a kinetic sculpture. It can reproduce an image of a famous Renaissance painting and record that image to video, film, facsimile, a plotter or a printer... I see the computer as part of the natural evolution of an artist's tools. It can facilitate areas of traditional drudgery in a manner analogous to the Renaissance masters applying their cartoons to frescoes. It can help develop an artists "eye," through which the creative act is channeled into the work of art. Not because it can think, but because it can be told how to calculate in a logical fashion, the computer can also be used for art research and analysis. In other words, computers can be made to accommodate the entire breadth of artistic thought. But even that broad potential does not make the computer more than a tool - it only shows that the computer can be a variety of tools."