The Department of Media Study’s PLASMA (Performances, Lectures, Screenings of Media Artists)​​ will feature a lecture by Rebekah Rutkoff entitled “Lillian Schwartz: The Artist and the Computer” on Zoom. The Meeting ID for the lecture series is 959 5554 2975. Email paigesar@buffalo with PLASMA2021 in the subject line for password.​

Rebekah Rutkoff is the author of The Irresponsible Magician: Essays and Fictions (semiotext(e), 2015) and the editor of a volume of essays by and about the American filmmaker Robert Beavers (Austrian Film Museum/Columbia UP, 2017). She is a recipient of a Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her work on Schwartz and is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT).

Lillian Schwartz (B. 1927) began drawing as a child with a sidewalk canvas and brush of slate. In Japan during the occupation, she caught Polio. The treatment for overcoming paralysis consisted of learning to move her muscles until she could slowly draw with pen and ink. She never recovered from her stay near Hiroshima where shadow bodies that had been real people decorated remnants of buildings. Her early acrylics were often dark, bleak. She studied art techniques with well-know artists, but oils and acrylics were not enough. She moved them to plastic paintings over lights and to collages. Then kinetic fluid in lit boxes, electronic mobiles, plastic imagery through changing the chemical composition, and then a complex piece in MOMA that led to her entry into Bell Labs in 1968 where she developed programs, special color filters and editing techniques, art and historical analyses, art films and graphics that could be viewed in 2D or 3D without pixel shifting. A pioneer, she created a new technique for 2D/3D. In her 80s, she sees films in her mind filled by grand whorls of imagination with her memory of images she had created. From poverty and a cement canvas to paralysis cured through precise practice with pen and ink, from oils to kinetic metals to 2D/3D, she pushed and pushes through each media to find something more, something forever, changing vision, perception, and knowledge of life’s war and peace. http://lillian.com/

As always, PLASMA lectures are free and open to the UB community and the public.​ Email paigesar@buffalo with PLASMA2021 in the subject line for password and/or additional information.

Brief remarks addressed to the students who are enrolled in PLASMA as a credit-course will begin at 6:00PM sharp. As a result, the guest lectures often begin a little later than 6:00. It should be noted that Jason Geistweidt’s performance on March 22nd will begin at 6:00pm sharp.

PLASMA is sponsored by the University at Buffalo’s Department of Media Study and funding is provided by the the Office of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. The series is curated by Dr. Paige Sarlin, Assistant Professor of Media Study, in collaboration with Liz Park – UB Art Galleries and Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center.

For more information: https://arts-sciences.buffalo.edu/media-study/news-events/plasma.html

The recordings of previous presentations can be found on MediaStudy@UB’s PLASMA 2021 YouTube Channel​.​​​