Zach Lieberman in conversation with Jane de Almeida

Drawing Room is pleased to present the second film in a series of recorded conversations that derive from A Companion to Contemporary Drawing, a recently published book edited by Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum, which explores how 20th and 21st century artists have used drawing to understand and comment on the world. Featuring contributions from Drawing Room Co-Director Kate Macfarlane, the publication is available here.

This conversation between Zach Lieberman and Jane de Almeida is based on Chapter 22, entitled: 'The Dot and the Line: Drawing amongst computers'. The chapter explores precursors to drawing through computers; different ways artists were first challenged by algorithmic determination. The chapter questions art exhibition spaces, as well as art's critical reception of computer drawings through a discussion of experiments by Michael Noll, Vera Mólnar, Charles Csuri, among others. Work by more recent artists such as Antoine Schmitt and Zach Lieberman is explored to underline the complex encounter between drawings, computers and audiences.

Zachary Lieberman won the Golden Nica from Ars Electronica, Interactive Design of the Year from Design Museum London, and was listed in Time Magazine's Best Inventions of the Year for the work EyeWriter.  He creates artwork through writing software and is a co-creator of openFrameworks, an open source C++ toolkit for creative coding. Lieberman takes the place of the artist, but also of the inventor.He develops works in Europe, South America and the United States in collaboration with various artists and programmers, witnessing the most radical computational changes in recent years, proposing a creative integration between the artist and the machine, and defying automation.
 
Jane de Almeida is Professor at the department of Graduate Studies in Education, Art and History of Culture at Mackenzie University (São Paulo, Brazil) and has been visiting professor at University of California, San Diego. She was a visiting fellow at the History of Art and Architecture department at Harvard University and artist in residence at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination (UCSD, 2018). She has curated a number of exhibitions including “Programming the Visible: Harun Farocki”, “The Fifth Act” of Alexander Kluge's films, and “In the Beginning all was Black, of Aldo Tambellini's works, in Brazil. Jane has published articles and books on the relationship between digital and contemporary film and art.