This film, named Vol Libre, was presented by Loren Carpenter at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in 1980. It is the world’s first fractal movie and utilizes 8-10 different fractal generating algorithms. After that presentation, the author was hired by Lucasfilms and used an antialiased version of the same software to create the fractal planet in the Genesis Sequence of Star Trek 2, the Wrath of Khan.

Longer article at kottke.org
Loren Carpenter on Wikipedia

Computer Baroque is an online exhibition, curated by Richard Wright and hosted by Animate Projects. The show includes a selection of defining works in the history of artists’ digital moving image (featuring pioneers Karl Sims, Yoichiro Kawaguchi, William Latham, Beriou, John Tonkin, Chris Landreth, Peter Callas, Simon Biggs, Ruth Lingford, James Duesing, Paul Garrin, Shelley Lake, The Butler Brothers and Jason White & Richard Wright). Rarely seen, they represent a period – the eighties and early nineties – in which computer animation was the focus for the most audacious and exuberant experiments across all areas of new media, art and technology.

Why characterise this period as ‘Baroque’? I think it was the sense that by the late 1980s we had at last reached a stage where more than just a handful of insiders were able to harness the power of computers. Artists wanted to push the computer as far as it would go, to create visual transformations that defied previous traditions, to blend image and music and text, to apply scientific ideas as new sources of inspiration. It created a strident kind of image that insisted on the fact of its own realisation, fleeting paeans to the artificial. Yet equally present was a nagging anxiety, that this artifice was an illusion that disguised totalizing control, paranoia and catastrophe. (Richard Wright)

http://www.animateprojects.org

The Artist and the Computer (1976) is a documentary about Lillian Schwartz’s work with computers and features excerpts from several of her films.
Lillian Schwartz is known for her pioneering work in the use of computers for what has since become known as computer-generated art and computer-aided art analysis, including graphics, film, video, animation, special effects, Virtual Reality and Multimedia.

The Artist and the Computer – Part I
The Artist and the Computer – Part II
http://www.lillian.com