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Zach Lieberman has a simple mission: he wants you surprised. He creates installations and performances that combine expressive, organic and whimsical interfaces and techniques of magic to explore the unseen: hand shadows play music, painted forms come off the paper, the voice is made visible. In this talk he will explain his artistic practice as well as introduce the communities of openFrameworks and the School for Poetic Computation, two projects he helped co-found.

Augmenting the body’s ability to communicate has always been at the core of Lieberman’s work. He created installations—”Remark” and “Hidden Worlds”—that presented interpretations of what the voice might look like if we could see our own speech. Similarly, the concert performance “Messa Di Voce” illustrated the abstract songs of two vocalists by interactive visualization software. Lieberman’s installation “Drawn,” in which painted forms appear to come to life, recently won awards in the Ars Electronica and CYNETart competitions.

Most recently, he helped create visuals for the facade of the new Ars Electronica Museum, wrote software for an augmented reality magic trick, and helped develop an open source eye tracker to help a paralyzed graffiti artist draw again. Lieberman is co-creator of openFrameworks, an open source C++ toolkit for creative coding. He teaches at Parsons School of Design.