Bell Labs was probably the first organisation that generated computer animation, via an SC4020, for artistic purposes. A good description is given in Michael Noll's paper First-Hand:Early Digital Art At Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc.
Most of the early output on the SC4020 used its small hardware character set to simulate a lineprinter or used its short line drawing capability for diagrams etc. The Bell Labs SC4020 was also used to produce updated microfilm copies of the current set of telephone numbers in an area for the Directory Enquiries Operators. There was a need for titles in larger characters made out of short lines and several Bell Lab fonts were produced. This is the letter Q in one of the fonts with different widths of lines.
Ken Knowlton used a similar technique by generating different glyphs over a grid to produce a mosaic in his Beflix (Bell Flicks) system in 1963. Although not aimed towards generating computer art, it demonstrated a richer media than dots and lines that could be exploited by artists. Michael Noll, also at Bell Labs, demonstrated various artistic uses of computer animation such as choreography.
This section gives some other examples of the artistic uses of computer animation in the period up to 1975.
A good introduction to the challenges can be found in the 1968 paper by Charles Csuri and James Shaffer, Art, Computers and Mathematics .
The 1968 paper CAMP - computer assisted movie production by Citron and Whitney discusses the design of a language that avoids dependence upon the user's knowledge of mathematics, geometry, and programming and yet allows an artist to manipulate geometric figures.
Francis Honey's 1968 paper Computer Animation - A New Look makes the point that an animation system aimed at the engineer may appear an ugly, frightening monster to the artist. A second paper in 1971 Artist-Oriented Computer Animation discusses what an artist requires.
Alan Kitching in 1971 reported on the VIS-COM conference on The Creative Artist and Visual Communication .
The 1970 paper Interactive Computer Animation describes ACIANS, an Artist-Computer Interactive Animation System for the creation of animated cartoons.