In 2016, Zach Lieberman unintentionally stumbled into a new form of artmaking: art that is made with code. “My step-daughter was having trouble falling asleep by herself at the time and so I would hang out in her room, read some books and then as she tried to sleep, I’d code a sketch and in the morning show it to her,” he explained in an interview with Medium. And so began his experimentation.
Jump forward sometime later, and his experimentation turned into practice — a hybrid of drawing, animating, and coding. “My main focus is how computation can be used as a medium for poetry,” Lieberman stated on his website.
At first, Lieberman would share on his Instagram his daily sketches in the form of short animations. In these sketches, he tried out different visual ideas involving geometry, animation, gesture, and graphic form. “I had no idea what to expect but it felt like a good new years resolution and a nice way to experiment with some ideas I had been thinking about,” he would later admit.
His sketches are coded in openFrameworks (using Xcode), but a few use paper.js. “I don’t use GitHub, I don’t keep code clean, I just make and record without thinking very carefully about anything,” he says. “I sketch up until the point I think it’s interesting, record it, post it and clock out. It’s the opposite of how I approach commercial work. When I sketch I want to work as messy and mindlessly as possible — I don’t plan, I just see where the wind blows.”
We’re here to follow his interesting progress, wherever it takes him.
