Push Me Pull You

FOR ZACH LIEBERMAN , ART ISN’T JUST ABOUT CREATING AN OBJECT DESIGNED TO SELL. IT CAN ALSO BE INTERACTIVE AND GET THE AUDIENCE INVOLVED IN THE CREATIVE PROCESS ITSELF…

- Beren Neale

When it came to promoting this year’s Brand Impact Awards, we wanted to grab people’s attention with an awesome visual that would be impossible to ignore. So we naturally turned to Zach Lieberman, a Brooklyn-based artist, designer, teacher and computer programmer whose code-based work utilises technology to create spectacularly playful and joyous motion graphics.

The fluid, celebratory and colourful graphic he created for us was suitably jaw-dropping (you can see it on the BIA homepage, at www. brandimpactawards.com). And it’s typical of the projects that have won him such plaudits as the Golden Nica from Prix Ars Electronica and the Interactive Design of the Year from The Design Museum, London.

We caught up with Lieberman to discuss why coding is like print-making, how students can reinvigorate your creativity, and whether what he does can truly be considered art.

The image-generating app you created for our Brand Impact Awards site was amazing! How did you go about creating it?

I created it in openFrameworks, a C++ toolkit that I helped make. It draws a blob shape and pulls it to a point. One of the things I love to explore is how 3D shapes can look 2D, or 2D can look 3D. This form here is 3D, but it’s coloured in a flat way, where traditional 3D software might use lighting and shadows to help you understand the form. I like things to be ambiguous.

Can you walk us through a couple of recent projects that you’ve been involved in?

SHA inc is an incredible design studio in Japan, and I helped it with the identity design for a national contest in Japan held by YouFab (www.instagram.com/p/B0oB_ hgDl35). The logo is a funky ‘Y’ and ‘F’ that has hands in it, and I piled them on top of each other in order to make some complex forms. I love it when things get messy and are on the border of legibility.