At Baukunst, collaboration is at the heart of everything we do. It brings us great pleasure and joy whenever we have the chance to collaborate with an artist, particularly one as innovative and relentlessly curious as Zach Lieberman.
Zach is an artist, researcher, and educator exploring generative and interactive design. He creates artwork through writing software and is a co-creator of openFrameworks, an open source C++ toolkit for creative coding and helped co-found the School for Poetic Computation, a school examining the lyrical possibilities of code. He is a professor at MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Future Sketches group.
When we were first launching the fund, we reached out to him to see if he would be open to creating a unique piece of art for Baukunst to feature on our homepage. To our delight, he said ‘Yes!’ and away we went.
It made sense to us to commission a generative art piece, a ‘living art’, because we invest in companies that are always growing and changing and we ourselves are committed to a constant pursuit of the new — new ideas, new playbooks, new ways of building.
As a result of the collaboration, we're proud to have Zach as a member of our Creative Technologist Council supporting the collective.
At our Creative Technologist Conference in Boston, we had the chance to sit down with Zach and talk with him about process, what inspires him both in art and life, and his advice to makers.
Baukunst: Do you consider yourself to be a creative technologist?
Zach Lieberman: Yeah. The field that I'm in is called creative coding. I like the term poetic computation, but all of these things mean basically the same thing, which is kind of combining technology with the arts.
Baukunst: How do you perceive the worlds of art and tech? And how do you meld them?
Zach Lieberman: I make software to make images and to make animation, but I could very well be stretching canvas or working with pigments. I’ve studied printmaking and it’s very technical. I think the (tech) medium is interesting because it allows you to do things that are very hard to do physically. The computer allows us to create images that are really kind of impossible to do by hand. But in the end, it's a tool.
Baukunst: What are some of the sources that inspire you on a daily or weekly basis? What are you tapping into to stay informed and inspired?
Zach Lieberman: I start every class I teach by asking my students, What have you seen this week that was not on a computer screen? Usually at the beginning of the semester, nobody has any good stories, but then somebody will say, Oh, I saw a lecture, or I went to this museum, or I went to this opening, or I went to a concert. Over the course of the semester, the stories get better and better.
For me, the things that are most inspiring tend to happen with a kind of serendipity. Seeing something I wasn’t intending to see. For example, last week I went to the aquarium because my 13-year-old daughter needed to get some extra credit. We were in the invertebrate section, and I was in love with it. I was so happy. I like the kind of thing where you step out of your house and you walk some place different. You just decide to go some place new. I try to bring that feeling to my work.
Baukunst: Is there anyone who has particularly inspired you in your work?
Zach Lieberman: Vera Molnar’s work has so much to teach about randomness and noise and the use of space between order and chaos. There's such a beautiful elegance in her work. I go back to it time and time again.
Baukunst: What advice do you give your students?
Zach Lieberman: I tell them that the world is hungry for ideas. Especially when you’re coming up, it’s easy to think everything cool has been done already, that everything already exists. I think it’s very important for them to understand that what has already been created is only a tiny fraction of the possible space. I think it’s hard when you’re young to see the empty air between things, to see the gaps. So, I think this phrase is really important – The world is hungry for ideas.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
