By Kate Gu and Zachary Lieberman

Zachary Lieberman is an artist, educator, researcher—and blob enthusiast. His practice spans twenty years and encompasses the fields of computer graphics, digital animation, and interactive design. He divides his time equally between art making, teaching, and commercial work.

Below is a conversation between Lieberman and Kate Gu, M+ Producer, Digital Special Projects, delving into his practice, career history, and daily digital sketches. Their chat also explores the process behind the M+ digital commission Atlas of Blobs, for which Lieberman invited writers, designers, and researchers from different disciplines to respond creatively to his blob sketches.

Kate Gu: You studied printmaking and sculpture at art school. What made you pivot to programming? What was it like to self-study and start from scratch?

Zachary Lieberman: It sounds very cheesy, but I had to get a job. At the time, everyone was talking about web design and Y2K—the belief that the world was going to end in the year 2000 due to computer errors—and how you could get rich by being a computer programmer. I sort of stumbled into a design role at a small company in New York. I had NO design experience; I showed up to my interview with slides of my paintings. They somehow saw something in me and hired me.

I learned Photoshop and Illustrator and all these digital tools. One tool, Flash, really struck me—it was an animation tool, but it had this coding interface that could help you save time, and I fell in love with it. You could write a little phrase like ‘x = x+1’ and an object would move across the screen. I was honestly in love—I had always been a fan of animation but the techniques seemed so foreign to me. But here was this way of turning words into movement.

I think art in general is about making something out of nothing, and I fell in love with code for that reason: you are making something (movement) out of something that feels like nothing (words). At that moment, I decided to dedicate my life to learning this stuff—coding, animation, and so on. I didn’t know how to make a profession out of it at all, but I did know I had found a path I wanted to travel on.