Earlier this week we introduced you to Zach Lieberman, the man behind the open source creative code library, openFrameworks. Lieberman plays an important role as a teacher, community organizer, and champion of software-based art, but he’s also an accomplished artist in his own right, and has got the fine arts credentials to prove it. In Part 2 of our interview with Lieberman, we put his artistic practice into focus.Unlikely as it may seem, Lieberman studied painting and printmaking in college. His foray into the world of art and technology was a happy accident—after graduating, Lieberman was looking for work and bluffed his way into a web design job. He had to learn to use tools like Photoshop and Illustrator on the fly, but it was ultimately his encounters with Flash and ActionScript that would set him on the path that would come to define his artistic pursuits from then on. “I had always loved animation but never really got to explore it,” says Lieberman, “and here was this tool where it was easy and immediate to explore. Just by writing a line of code you could see something move across the screen and as you alter the parameters in the code, you change the movement.”Lieberman was hooked. He enrolled himself in the Design & Technology program at Parsons where he was able to experiment with all kinds of different mediums ranging from physical computing, computation and design, and 3D technology. Upon graduation, he began collaborating with one of his professors, Golan Levin, who remains one of his core collaborators to this day, and started teaching as well.These days, Lieberman has teamed up with one of his own students, Theo Watson, to run openFrameworks, and start an interactive company called YesYesNo. The duo work on projects all over the world, designing audio visual performances for the Ars Electronica museum in Austria, turning a building in New Zealnd into an interactive playground, and even designing the 3D scanning technology for the Digital Flesh installation by Radical Friend at our Creators Project events.The Creators Project: As somebody who studied fine art, which is about making tangible objects, you're now making work that lives on a computer screen or some kind of projection surface, and is intangible and immaterial. What similarities exist between your work then and now?
Zach Lieberman:There's a few things that I really want to carry over into the work I'm doing now. When I was a student I used to spend all my time in the print shop, and the print shop is this really communal art making experience. You can't really have your own print shop, it would be crazy—you'd need a really big space, the machines are really expensive and heavy—so everybody works together and there's a kind of sharing that happens. That's something that I'm trying to do now with openFrameworks, to create the same kind of experience, whether it be in these [in-person] labs that we create or online.What's been interesting for me is I'm really interested in gesture. I've always been interested in drawing and animation, and I'm always trying to take the ideas that I was exploring as an art student further. In addition, what excites me about this [digital] medium is that it invites people to become performers and participants. If you think about what we do on a computer most of the time—click yes, no, cancel—it's these very repetitive tasks, not a lot of personality, and we try to bring a kind of human-ness to this thing that surrounds us and create situations where people can express themselves and become performers.I guess one of the things that I really love is that it's not an object, it's software and it's soft, it's malleable, it's adjustable and it doesn't really have a home. It doesn't belong in a gallery in Chelsea, in a way it belongs on the street and there's something really nice about that.I've heard you say many times that you think artists are doing research and development (R&D) for humanity. Can you expand on that a bit?
I think a lot of times we think about the arts as being this separate entity. You see these stories about school districts cutting funding for the arts and I think we really need to position the arts as being an integral part of society—a very important part of society that helps us understand who we are and how we are.People talk about art vs. science, and what we're doing in this medium is really a mixture of the arts and the sciences. I do a lot of work where I'm programming, which is very grounded in computer science, or signal analysis, and I meet scientists and we talk about what we do and there's a lot of overlap. And I think that that's really important to explore and talk about. So, when I say that artistic practice is R&D for humanity, it's really to kind of make the argument that this divide we see between the arts and sciences is artificial and we need to operate in the blurry in-between area.What are you working on right now?
I'm working on the EyeWriter project, which is an open source eye tracker that we've been developing specifically for one person, a guy named Tempt, who is an old-school LA graffiti writer who's paralyzed with Lou Gehrig's disease, and we've been developing this tool to help him draw again. We are working now on a version 2 of the device, which solves a lot of problems and I think is going to be really helpful for people, so we're really pushing that right now. I've been working on a toy, too, which is out in Japan and is coming out in the US—Hasbro is putting it out in the fall—which is a kind of modern day jigsaw puzzle. I've also been teaching here at SVA and working on a couple of performances that will happen in the fall—one is about language and the other is about books.Your projects definitely run the gamut. How do you decide what you're going to work on next? Where are you culling your sources of inspiration from?
It feels kind of schizophrenic, but I try to do maybe two or three commercial jobs a year and that usually allows me the freedom to do more artistic and playful things. A lot of the inspiration for me comes from these kind of 'What if?' questions. Like, 'What if you could see your voice?' I have a performance called Drawn where I'm painting with ink, and that came out of the question, 'What if the paint actually came off the paper?'. Really, the hardest part is coming up with good questions. And then when you find a good question you just get consumed by it and start making stuff.What makes a good question?
I think a lot of times they're simple, simple questions. I had this experiment that I did in college, one on the first things I did with code, and for me it was a turning point. The question was, 'What would happen if you drew a line and it uncurled itself?' You think about it, if you draw a line with no curvature, it has no motion, but if you draw a line with lots of curves, it moves, and has a really dramatic motion. It's the kind of thing that you could do on paper, sketching, you could do it with wire, you could do it in a traditional manner, but that question drove me to write some software, and I created this kind of expressive, weird, funky drawing tool. That tool for me was this moment of realization if you ask this question, you build this tool, and then you get to play. And then I couldn't stop playing with it once I made it. I think the questions should be simple and elegant and lead to these tools that are just super fun.Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
Umm…that's a really hard question to answer. I really like this idea of helping the next generation of artists. I've been involved with having a lot of workshops, and teaching and so on, and I think in five years I would love to still be making work, but I would love to be in a position to help other people make work. And I don't know what that means, if that takes me in one direction or another, but I think in 5 years, I would love to be doing what I'm doing now, and if I have the chance to help other people do it, I would love to.
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Zach Lieberman:There's a few things that I really want to carry over into the work I'm doing now. When I was a student I used to spend all my time in the print shop, and the print shop is this really communal art making experience. You can't really have your own print shop, it would be crazy—you'd need a really big space, the machines are really expensive and heavy—so everybody works together and there's a kind of sharing that happens. That's something that I'm trying to do now with openFrameworks, to create the same kind of experience, whether it be in these [in-person] labs that we create or online.What's been interesting for me is I'm really interested in gesture. I've always been interested in drawing and animation, and I'm always trying to take the ideas that I was exploring as an art student further. In addition, what excites me about this [digital] medium is that it invites people to become performers and participants. If you think about what we do on a computer most of the time—click yes, no, cancel—it's these very repetitive tasks, not a lot of personality, and we try to bring a kind of human-ness to this thing that surrounds us and create situations where people can express themselves and become performers.
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I think a lot of times we think about the arts as being this separate entity. You see these stories about school districts cutting funding for the arts and I think we really need to position the arts as being an integral part of society—a very important part of society that helps us understand who we are and how we are.People talk about art vs. science, and what we're doing in this medium is really a mixture of the arts and the sciences. I do a lot of work where I'm programming, which is very grounded in computer science, or signal analysis, and I meet scientists and we talk about what we do and there's a lot of overlap. And I think that that's really important to explore and talk about. So, when I say that artistic practice is R&D for humanity, it's really to kind of make the argument that this divide we see between the arts and sciences is artificial and we need to operate in the blurry in-between area.What are you working on right now?
I'm working on the EyeWriter project, which is an open source eye tracker that we've been developing specifically for one person, a guy named Tempt, who is an old-school LA graffiti writer who's paralyzed with Lou Gehrig's disease, and we've been developing this tool to help him draw again. We are working now on a version 2 of the device, which solves a lot of problems and I think is going to be really helpful for people, so we're really pushing that right now. I've been working on a toy, too, which is out in Japan and is coming out in the US—Hasbro is putting it out in the fall—which is a kind of modern day jigsaw puzzle. I've also been teaching here at SVA and working on a couple of performances that will happen in the fall—one is about language and the other is about books.Your projects definitely run the gamut. How do you decide what you're going to work on next? Where are you culling your sources of inspiration from?
It feels kind of schizophrenic, but I try to do maybe two or three commercial jobs a year and that usually allows me the freedom to do more artistic and playful things. A lot of the inspiration for me comes from these kind of 'What if?' questions. Like, 'What if you could see your voice?' I have a performance called Drawn where I'm painting with ink, and that came out of the question, 'What if the paint actually came off the paper?'. Really, the hardest part is coming up with good questions. And then when you find a good question you just get consumed by it and start making stuff.What makes a good question?
I think a lot of times they're simple, simple questions. I had this experiment that I did in college, one on the first things I did with code, and for me it was a turning point. The question was, 'What would happen if you drew a line and it uncurled itself?' You think about it, if you draw a line with no curvature, it has no motion, but if you draw a line with lots of curves, it moves, and has a really dramatic motion. It's the kind of thing that you could do on paper, sketching, you could do it with wire, you could do it in a traditional manner, but that question drove me to write some software, and I created this kind of expressive, weird, funky drawing tool. That tool for me was this moment of realization if you ask this question, you build this tool, and then you get to play. And then I couldn't stop playing with it once I made it. I think the questions should be simple and elegant and lead to these tools that are just super fun.Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
Umm…that's a really hard question to answer. I really like this idea of helping the next generation of artists. I've been involved with having a lot of workshops, and teaching and so on, and I think in five years I would love to still be making work, but I would love to be in a position to help other people make work. And I don't know what that means, if that takes me in one direction or another, but I think in 5 years, I would love to be doing what I'm doing now, and if I have the chance to help other people do it, I would love to.