Lillian Schwartz and Ken Knowlton Make “UFOs”

Following the seminal Pixillation (1970), in 1971 Lillian Schwartz and Ken Knowlton made UFOs at Bell Labs.

It was another film of computer-generated shapes that raced and pulsed across the screen in saturated color, set to a score by Emmanuel Ghent. Like Pixillation, Schwartz again worked the computer output through color filters and an optical printer. The film's rapid alternation of frames was strong enough that viewers reported afterimages of colors that were not on the screen.

With UFOs Schwartz pushed computer film toward perception itself, echoing later work by artists like Kurt Hentschlager. Schwartz went on to make more than thirty films at Bell Labs over the next two productive decades.