Zachary Lieberman
Making Things Move

Workshop December, 10-15 2009
Public lecture December 10

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Zachary Lieberman is an artist with a simple goal: he wants you surprised. He creates artwork that uses technology in a playful and seamless way to explore the nature of communication and the delicate boundary between the visible and the invisible. He makes performances, installations, and on-line 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, performed by Marco Tempest, and helped develop an open source eye tracker to help a paralyzed graffiti artist draw again.

In addition to making artistic projects, Lieberman is co-creator of openFrameworks, an open source C++ toolkit for creative coding.

He teaches at Parsons School of Design.

Workshop brief

Making Things Move

This workshop will look at the fundamentals of animation and animated form through the lens of computation. Artists have always used different technology to animate - from early zoetropes to hand drawn etched film - and with programming, there is a new branch of a long tradition forming. We will focus on techniques for writing code to move objects in a compelling and life-like manner. For folks who have never programmed, this workshop will work as a gentle but hands on introduction to the medium, for experts this will present new approaches and strategies for expression. In addition to looking at and working through code, we will be studying several pioneers of abstract animation, Norman McLaren, John Whitney, Oskar Fischinger, as well as modern day practitioners like Toshio Iwai and Masahiko Sato. Finally, we will introduce principles of kinetic motion, looking at how the screen based animation can work its way through micro-controllers into the outside world and how the outside world can present ideas and metaphors for screen based motion.

Technically, the course will be taught using a series of code examples, tools and problems coded in openframeworks, a cross platform c++ toolkit for creative hacking. There will be some introductory material provided before the workshop to help students who are just getting started up to speed. While some familiarity with programming concepts is helpful (ie, knowing about variables and functions) what's most important is a curiosity, open mind, and a desire to get one's hands dirty.

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