Rebecca Allen (1953, Detroit) has been working with computers as an art medium since the 1970s, collaborating with artists including Nam June Paik and musicians such as Kraftwerk, Mark Mothersbaugh from Devo and Carter Burwell. She was one of the first artists to digitally animate the human body at a time when digital art was dominated by abstraction. Girl Lifts Skirt (1974) is Allen’s first computer animation, produced from a set of preparatory drawings that were translated into coordinates animated by software. She describes the work as ‘a comment on women’s sexuality and the absence of the female perspective in technology. At that time, artists working with computers were mostly working with geometric shapes, which is what the computer could do best. I was interested in bringing a different kind of aesthetic, one that would focus on the human body in motion and insert a human and feminine presence into the computer’.

Allen subsequently made Swimmer (1981) while working at the Computer Graphics Laboratory at New York Institute of Technology: ‘They were considered the best research laboratory in the development of the early software systems for the creation of computer graphics and animation. The first and only 3D model of a female body in the world was made by the lab director, Ed Catmull. It gave me the idea to bring this “frozen model” to life. At that time, making 3D human motion was considered one of the hardest technical challenges. Swimmerwas the first motion piece that I created from that research and one of the first examples of 3D human motion. I’m a long-time swimmer myself and was keen to work on the movement and fluidity of this “body” within a three-dimensional environment.’