Developer on Fire
Episode 087 | Zach Lieberman - Tech and Expression
Zach Lieberman is an artist with a simple goal: he wants you surprised. His work uses technology in a playful way to break down the fragile boundary between the visible and the invisible. He has held residencies at Ars Electronica Futurelab, Eyebeam, Dance Theater Workshop, and the Hangar Center for the Arts in Barcelona, and his work has been exhibited around the world. Zach is one of the co-founders of openFrameworks, a C++ library for creative coding. In addition, he makes performances, installations, and online works that investigate gestural input, augmentation of the body, kinetic response, and magic. Most recently, he helped create visuals for the facade of the new Ars Electronica Museum, wrote software for an augmented reality card trick, created a 73 mile long light installation for the Olympics, and helped develop an open source eye tracker to help a paralyzed graffiti artist draw again. Projects he’s worked on have won Design of the Year from the London Design Museum, FutureEverything prize and the Golden Nica in Interactive Art at Ars Electronica, as well as be included in Time Magazine’s list of the 50 best inventions. Zach is one of the recipients of the AOL 25 for 25 grant, and was listed in Fast Company Magazine’s 100 Creative people in business. He serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Council on the Arts, and he’s an assistant professor at Parsons School of Design, where he teaches about the intersection of art and computation.
Chapters:
- - Dave introduces the show and Zach Lieberman
- - Zach's views and history with the intersection of art and technology
- - Communal art and open source software
- - Software and art and Zach's definition of value - "The Open Mouth Phenomenon"
- - Music and expression
- - The things that "light Zach up"
- - Open Frameworks
- - Zach's stories of failure - hardware failures and elements of the real world in live performances
- - Zach's success stories - creating a great project and community, restoring creativity for a paralyzed artist
- - How Zach stays current with what he needs to know
- - Zach's book recommendation
- - The things that have Zach most excited
- - Zach's top 3 tips for delivering more value
- - Keeping up with Zach
Resources:
- Zach's website
- Zach on Medium
- Open Frameworks
- Watch Zach Given a Talk - "The Open Mouth Phenomenon
- Dave's Son Watching a Skydiving performance
- Kinect
- Leap Motion
- Theo Watson
- Arturo Castro
- Speak & Spell
- Eye Tracking
- Eye Writer
- ALS ("Lou Gehrig's Disease"
- Graffiti Markup Language
- School for Poetic Computation
- MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Sign, Storage, Transmission) - Jonathan Sterne
Zach's book recommendations:
- The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins - Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
- John Maeda Books
- When the Machine Made Art: The Troubled History of Computer Art (International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics) - Grant D. Taylor
Zach's top 3 tips for delivering more value:
1. Surround yourself with people who help you understand your value
2. Be as open as possible
3. Be relentlessly curious