By 1966, Schwartz had begun working with
light boxes and mechanical devices like pumps, and she became a member of the
Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) group that brought together artists and engineers as collaborators. Schwartz was brought into
Bell Labs by
Leon Harmon, where she was a "resident visitor" from 1969 to 2002. While there, she worked with engineers John Vollaro and others, including extensive collaboration with
Ken Knowlton, a
software engineer and
computer artist who had also had work in the 1968 Museum of Modern Art show. That collaboration produced a series of computer-animated films, each built from the output of visual generative algorithms written by Knowlton and edited by Schwartz. She took classes in programming at
The New School for Social Research around that same time. She began making paintings and films with a combination of hand painting, digital collaging, computer and other image processing, and optical post-processing, initially working with Knowlton's 1963 computer graphics language,
BEFLIX, his subsequent graphics language EXPLOR and also SYMBOLICS. By 1975, Schwartz and Knowlton, in collaboration, had made ten of the first digitally created computer-animated films to be exhibited as works of fine art:
Pixillation,
Olympiad,
UFOs,
Enigma,
Googolplex,
Apotheosis,
Affinities,
Kinesis,
Alae, and
Metamorphosis. While those 10 films did not yet involve the digital editing of images or image sequences, Schwartz having edited them as physical film the conventional way, in her work of subsequent periods, Schwartz's creative cobbling together of different, often cutting-edge technologies has been said to prefigure what would later become common practice in such programs as
Photoshop and
Final Cut Pro. Schwartz contributed to scientific research on color perception and sound. She had been a consultant at
AT&T Bell Laboratories,
IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory,
Exxon Research Center, and
Lucent Technologies Bell Labs Innovations. ==Death==