Zach Lieberman — co-creator of openFrameworks, co-founder of the School for Poetic Computation, and one of the most-followed generative artists working — opened a gallery exhibition this summer built from his daily sketch practice. For more than a decade Lieberman has made a small generative piece nearly every morning, often exploring a single idea (typography that flows like liquid, faces built from moving type, color studies that breathe) and posting it publicly. The show translates that relentless, low-stakes daily play into physical form: prints, large projections, and interactive installations.
Watch: 10 Years of Daily Sketching ft. Zach Lieberman (MIT Media Lab) (YouTube)
The daily sketch as a practice, not a product
Lieberman’s work is an argument about method as much as output. The daily sketch is deliberately small and disposable — no piece has to be a masterpiece, which is exactly what frees him to experiment — and the accumulation of thousands of them is where the real body of work lives. It’s a discipline any creative coder can adopt: constrain the scope, show up every day, follow curiosity rather than a plan, and let a decade of small experiments compound into a recognizable visual language. The exhibition is, in a sense, a case study in what that practice produces.
From open-source tool to poetic computation
It’s worth remembering that Lieberman also co-built openFrameworks, the C++ toolkit that powers a huge share of the installations and performances this site covers, and co-founded the School for Poetic Computation, a small alternative school premised on the idea that code is an expressive, humane medium. His art and his infrastructure argue the same thing: that programming is a way of thinking and feeling, not merely engineering. Seeing the sketches at architectural scale — a phone-sized loop blown up to fill a wall — makes the case physically.