The creative coder explains the throughline between drawing and computation, and why he’s jealous of pioneering artist Lillian Schwartz.
Welcome to Source Material, a weekly series where the designers and creatives shaping culture share the references that shaped them. Our next guest is @zachlieberman, a New York–based artist and educator who co-founded the School for Poetic Computation, helped develop openFrameworks, and teaches at MIT Media Lab.
After the shoot, we caught up with Zach about his creative process:
What were you making when you realized, “This could be my job”?
I studied fine art, drawing, and printmaking, and I struggled when I started using a computer because it felt less expressive than the pencils and paint brushes I was used to. But then I made a simple coding experiment where you draw a line, and it uncurls itself. It was so alive and organic, and I felt confident after that point that I could spend my career asking weird questions like that.
What’s the first thing you do when you sit down to work?
I often sketch on paper and map out some ideas I want to try. I also open up yesterday’s project and run it a few times to think about how I can change something old to make it something new.
What’s a design object you’d take to your grave?
The original Mac computers, like Mac SE—I still remember how the mouse felt coming from an MS-DOS machine with green type. The idea that you could click anywhere on the screen opened up worlds for me. I would sit at my neighbor’s house and use the paint can tool in MacPaint and just click and click and click.
Whose work makes you jealous?
I’m jealous of a lot of people in my field, but mostly I’m jealous of artists who lived at different moments and got to explore a new medium for the first time. Lillian Schwartz at Bell Labs working with early computer animation, Myron Krueger doing the first body-based interaction, etc. It must have felt wild to be at the start of something.
What current design trend are you tired of seeing?
I’m very tired of seeing AI use which stops at the output—I think AI can be a useful tool for conversation, but it’s becoming maddening to see posters and images in delis that are clearly just outputs from AI.