Iterative illusions with Zach Lieberman

Zach Lieberman, artist and creative coder, speaks to Moving World about the process and motivation behind his daily experiments in AR.

Hi Zach. One of the coolest things about following you on social media is seeing you iterate on an idea. What’s your process, and how do you keep the momentum up?

I work both on paper and in code. Sometimes, I know what I want to see and the code sketches are a way of getting there. Other times, I just experiment, trying to see how I can change something to make it new. I am usually multi-tasking, and often the sketching is a kind of creative release valve for other work where I might be struggling with a hard problem. Since I can dictate what I do in the sketches, I decide how hard or easy I want it to be.

In terms of momentum, I just try to do something that’s fun and then it’s not hard to do daily — sometimes I post more than one time a day. Sometimes sketches take 5 minutes, sometimes they can take hours, but it’s just about having joy with code. One thing I try to do is the minimal amount of work to make something new. I mostly iterate on old sketches and ideas and try to push them. I think if I was making something completely new every day it would be hard. I just try to iterate every day.

How important is sharing socially to your experimentation?

I feel like making and sharing are intimately connected — and social media makes it easy to get into productive feedback loops. I find it super interesting to see the mismatch between what I like and what others like — that’s super informative to me as an artist as often the hardest challenge is seeing your work with someone else’s eyes.

What is it that excites you the most about working with AR?

I usually never get excited about a new technology, but AR (especially things like ARKit and ARCore) allows for us to know where a device is in 3D space. I believe that means we can ask more fundamental questions like what does it mean to be a camera? What does it mean to be a display, now that I can move you around? As artists, we’ve been asking these questions for a while but now we can use the devices we have in our pocket to try to answer them.

Another thing I dig about AR is that it produces generally ambiguous images. I love images that force your brain to work a little harder — like optical illusions, 3D graphics that look 2D or 2D graphics that look 3D. It feels like the image bounces around in your brain a bit more. With AR, your mind has to work a bit harder and I love that. I think a lot of my sketches are about this — what kind of work do we ask the brain to do?

I love playing around in code with AR, I am just really having fun being silly with code in space. It’s lovely how social it is — unlike VR, where you kind of close yourself off into someone else’s reality, AR brings you out into the world.

Thanks Zach!

Zach goes into more detail about his year of daily experiments on his Medium channel and you can follow him on Instagram here.

This is part of our series looking at 2017 and asking what we can expect from the next year. Read more here.

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