Zach Lieberman

Zach Lieberman is an artist and educator based in New York who makes his work by writing software. He builds experimental tools for drawing and animation, and interactive installations that turn visitors into performers. He calls his main interest the use of computation as a medium for poetry. He studied fine arts at Hunter College and design and technology at Parsons School of Design, where he went on to teach for about ten years.

In 2003 he and Golan Levin made Messa di Voce, a concert in which software turns the voices of the singers Jaap Blonk and Joan La Barbara into live graphics. Two years later he released the first version of openFrameworks, an open-source C++ toolkit for creative coding that he developed with Theo Watson and Arturo Castro. EyeWriter, built in 2009 with a team of artists and engineers, is a low-cost eye-tracking system that let the paralyzed graffiti writer TEMPT1 draw again using only his eyes. It won the Golden Nica for Interactive Art at Prix Ars Electronica in 2010, and MoMA bought it for its collection in 2011.

In 2013 he co-founded the School for Poetic Computation in New York, and he now leads the Future Sketches group at the MIT Media Lab. He posts sketches made with code almost every day, and his onchain work grows out of them. 100 Sunsets is a series of 100 generative sunsets released with Bright Moments at NFT ART CDMX in Mexico City in 2022. Color Blinds Study, 25 moving works about light passing through striped blinds, was shown in his 2023 solo exhibition in London. M+ in Hong Kong commissioned his Atlas of Blobs in 2022.