Unit-on-Chain is a podcast series from Unit London offering a ground for critical discussions for artists and thought leaders from the Web3 ecosystem.
Season 1 of our podcast coincides with In Our Code, a highly-anticipated exhibition of generative and digital art in partnership with AOI, on display from 13 September – 16 October exclusively at Unit London.
For Finding Poetry in Creative Coding, the fourth episode of the series, join us in conversation with Zach Lieberman (professor and artist) and Che-Yu Wu (artist) about their journey into creative coding from other disciplines, the poetics of creating interactive experiences, and educating the next generation of digital artists.
Episode Highlights
Coding Emotions into Art
Zach: I think my work is oftentimes about finding beauty with maths. Some stuff I do is interactive or uses different types of inputs like cameras and microphones. A lot of the generative work that I do is just about numbers and trying to find something that is organic and absurd and interesting with maths.
My piece for this show is based on a light simulation. It’s an algorithm for simulating light where for every pixel you shoot off in random directions and you think, “what am I looking at? What is near me? And what colour is it?” So you’re at a per pixel level, simulating or imagining what the light sources would colour this pixel. Then the elements that are creating the light are moving in this circular pattern. It’s really a sphere that has a bit of wobbliness to it. It’s not a geometric primitive, but it’s based on a geometric primitive.
So the whole idea is to take something really universal, like a globe or a sphere and just rotate it and see the lights that it creates. I really like playing with this tension between something which is really purely mathematical and that is really organic and has little sub motions and little things happening, and that is the kind of interesting tension in this work. Those little subtle movements change the pieces. To me there’s a really direct connection between movement and feeling, and you can create and convey a lot of different emotions through movement.
Che-Yu: Actually I started intensely creating this kind of creative coding work since Covid. That’s why I have a lot of emotions to put into it, desperately. I will start from a simple idea. Like, I want to make lights, I want to make a ball moving around, I want to make a tree or something I see in my life. Then after that I will start from this idea to make a prototype. and I will feel what I want to express in this work. So it’s a dynamic and organic process. After that I’ll feel like, “Oh, maybe it can use some different colour palette and a different form or it can add some interactive factor that users can interact with.”
So for this work in the exhibition, it’s a particle simulation. I really like to simulate something, I like to design a system or design a sub universe and then set the initial condition of all the particles or all the elements inside it, and then allow them to interact with each other or allow them to be affected by this space.
And I really like that unpredictable result from this kind of experiment and see what this code and this art can finally become. In this organic process, I would just adjust it and feel it and then get the final result to see how the final representation of this emotion and of this idea.
What’s the Relationship between Poetry and Creative Coding?
Zach: I teach at the MIT Media Lab and at the Media Lab there’s a phrase that’s really well known or very popular there, which is called “Demo or Die”. The idea is that you always need to demonstrate you’re working on some new technology, you need to make a demo of it.
And the word “DEMO”, if you take those letters and flip them around, take the D and flip it upside down to turn it into a P, like you can rearrange the letters and make the word “POEM”. I often think about this difference between a demo and a poem. A demo is a demonstration of a technology, it’s kind of showing you, “Okay, here’s a cool particle system, or a different algorithm, here’s a demonstration of what this algorithm could do.” A poem is actually speaking with the art first, with “What is it that you want to convey about what it means to be human and what it means to be alive?”
And so I’d like to focus on the word poetry because it is a reminder for the technology to be in service of the art. That the art and what you want to convey and the meaning that you want to convey should be in the lead and the technology’s in service of it. And I think just the comparison between the word poem and demo is a good reminder of, are we trying to make demos? Or are we trying to make poems? And that’s the question that I ask myself pretty much every day.
Why are Interactive Experiences Important?
Zach: I came up in the Ars Electronica world making interactive work and started working with Golan Levin, who was one of my teachers. We started working together and making projects at Ars Electronica and media art festivals. We continued to make work that’s interactive, that is about using your body, taking your voice as input, or your movement as input, or drawings as input, or just something that you bring to it and that you really are creating a feedback loop with the audience where the artwork really doesn’t exist or doesn’t do much until you come. And it’s this weird art form that’s about agency, that’s about expression, that’s about creation and co-creation with the audience member, inviting them to be participants.
Che-Yu: I think the most special interactive experience for me is solo exhibition I created in Taiwan, in Taipei 101 in May. In that exhibition, I first projected my works on a large screen and also in the immersive space. That’s the first time I feel that, it feels really different when people are really engaged and also immersed, when all the arts are surrounding you on a different scale. It feels different from seeing images on the website. In that show I also make interactive music so I’m also doing music production and making a lot of DJ experience. That’s when I start feeling that maybe there can be more of this kind of art. There is some intuitive part for people to directly feel the art, when they see the art, and when their action can somehow affect how the art form is changing.
On Inspirations behind Their Works in In Our Code
Che-Yu: I’m inspired by Impressionism. The first inspiration in input is Starry Night by Van Gogh and I like Impressionism because the technique of creating Impressionism art is similar to generative art. Traditional artists pick up some pixels and colours in their real life, and they change the hue a little bit, they change the brightness a little bit and try to use different strokes like watercolour or different brush to reproduce this in their art.
So this is the transforming machine between the input and output, just like when we are creating code art. So that’s the first inspiration and input. And then after I created the first version of that, I simulate the particles and I feel that, it feels like the mountains and villages.
So, that’s why I started finding different mountains and villages around the world and started finding what this looks like. Maybe I can place some trees, maybe I can add some windows to those wavy shapes, so it links more to people’s memory about what they see in their real life.
Finally I picked some vibrant colours. So I referenced some colours, from traditional Chinese temples, and also a little bit from Mexican culture, so that’s a mixture of the vibrant colours of different cultures but they all use vibrant colours. But they didn’t fight with each other. So, I’m really excited to create a work with such vibrant colour which reminds me of some imaginary village, so I called it Fairy Village. It’s still very generative art, you can see it’s made by some waves and being bound by maths and physical rules.
Zach: The inspiration for my piece is a film from 1963 by Edward Zajac. It’s the first computer-animated film. It was created at Bell Labs and it’s a one and a half minute film. The film is called Simulation of a Two-Gyro Gravity-Gradient Attitude Control System. It’s basically a spinning sphere with what looks like a satellite moving around it and a clock. I see this film a lot because I teach a class called “Recreating the Past”, and in the class we recreate artworks from artists from the past. So for example, Ken Knowlton, who recently passed away, was a researcher at Bell Labs and did a lot of work with pixels and mosaics.
We study his work and we recreate his work and there’s a film called The Incredible Machines from 1968 that’s all about Bell Labs and the kind of interesting and weird stuff that they were making there. This film from Zajac is in that film. I teach this class every semester, so I’ve seen this film numerous times.
What I love about it is that it’s the first animated film and it’s just this spinning sphere and it is the root of what I’m doing with my piece, which is spinning the sphere of points. I think when you find these references from history, you can make work that’s in conversation with them. You can have a kind of dialogue or conversation with artwork and artists that have come before and try to imagine them in today’s voice with today’s tools, with today’s energy, and I try to encourage my students to do that as well.
(Scroll to bottom for full transcript)
Biographies
Zach Lieberman is an artist and educator based in New York City. He studied Fine Art (painting and printmaking), taught at Parsons School of Design for a decade, and helped create the School of Poetic Computation. Zach creates artworks with code and focuses on building experimental drawing and animation tools. He also helped create openFrameworks, an open source c++ framework for creative coding. He is currently a Professor at MIT Media Lab where he helps run the future sketches group
Che-Yu Wu is a new media artist, designer, engineer, speaker, and entrepreneur. He first trained as an electrical engineer in Taiwan, before acquiring a master’s degree in Integrated Digital Media from New York University. He draws inspirations from nature, physics, modern art, mathematical rhythm, and music to create compounding algorithmic works, explore the border between art and engineering, and establish interactive experiences.
Full Transcript
Abigail: So welcome both of you, I just wanna get started with our first question. I would love to know you guys’ transitions into creative coding, because both of you have such a technical background. Was there always an interest in art or was there a specific moment for you both?
Zach: I’m happy to start, my background is in Fine Arts, so I studied painting and printmaking and actually, I wasn’t very technical at all but I had to get a job and everybody was doing web design and talking about Y2K and the world’s gonna end in the year 2000. And I got a job, and I totally lied my way into a job.
I said I had a design background, but my background was in Fine Arts and I bluffed my way into a job and I discovered that you could really learn anything. You go to the bookstore, get a $50 book about Photoshop or about Illustrator, and I was learning these tools that we were using for the work and a tool that really struck me was Flash. Flash was this amazing tool where you could write a line of code to make something move. It was a timeline tool, it was an animation tool, but it also had this programming component. And I just fell in love. And I think from that moment, that I saw that you could write text and turn something into motion, I felt just enamoured and fell in love with it and I headed in that direction.
Abigail: Amazing. And then Che-Yu, your background is in Electrical Engineering. What was that shift like for you? Or was it similar to Zach’s?
Che-Yu: Actually, it’s pretty fun because when I was young, I liked making animations with Flash, in middle school or high school or something. And that’s how I started to step a little bit into design and injected emotions and made interactive works like this. But after that, because I study Electrical Engineering Taiwan, and I start to feel that I have desire to create something, not only create a programme to solve problems, I love to create something visual that is vivid and is evolving.
So that’s how I started to create interactive websites. And I opened a design studio, a website studio, to create websites for people. But the more I step into that, I feel that there’s something different when I’m making pure animation or pure interaction. So that’s why, actually I saw Zach Lieberman’s work a long time ago, and that’s my dream because (he was at) MIT Media Lab and also Poet Computation, that’s why I want to come to New York. And then applied to New York University and studied Creative Coding and New Media Art.
Abigail: Wow, so it’s really come full circle today.
Che-Yue: Yeah.
Abigail: So Zach,with your printmaking and painting background, do you still see that impacting your work today very heavily, or has it transitioned over the years?
Zach: Yeah, for sure. Printmaking is a really technical art form. It’s also a very social art form, so you’re hanging out in the printmaking studio and there are all of these processes where you’re inking a plate and putting paper in water and doing all of the mechanical things to make a work.
And I think, there’s also something so social about it. Most people think about making art as this sort of solitary experience, and when you’re in a printmaking studio, it’s a lot of hanging out and commenting “Oh, did you try this?” The sharing of knowledge that happens in a printmaking studio is really profound.
So I feel a similar feeling when I’m working with code and with open source tools. It is a really technical work, we’re building all of these libraries and instruments in order to make the artwork. But there’s also a social component and there’s a lot of sharing and collaboration that happens in this field. So, it feels like an extension of the printmaking studio, if I’m honest.
Abigail: Yeah, that’s really interesting that you bring up the community aspect and open source, because me and Che-Yu just had a conversation on Monday about everything that Che-Yu you do is open sourced and you can go onto your website and see everything in your process and go and see those works. Is that element of community really important to your work as well?
Che-Yu: Yeah, I think it’s hard because for people to just kickstart to become a creative coder or to step into computational art. It’s still very new in Taiwan, though some people engage in technical presentations or make algorithm music. There’s kind of a different approach in Taiwan, but there’s still a small group in Taiwan.
So that’s why I want to start to make my work more available or more approachable, through teaching creative coding, or by sharing my code or even recording my creative coding process.
So I think that can help the whole community to understand this and also share the joy. But I think most of the time, the more I give to the community, the more I can learn afterwards.
Zach: Yeah, I think there’s something really interesting in terms of the social dynamics. There’s a culture around NFTs and people making work and sharing work and seeing the communities forming, to me it feels like this sort of amalgamation of all these things, whether it’s how we all reacted with Covid, hanging out on Discord server, living a lot of our world online and being way more connected in digital space than (in real life). I feel it was this real, profound moment of intense loneliness at the beginning of Covid and intense (feeling of) “Oh my God, the world has really changed.” But then also, “Okay, now we’re able to connect in all these new ways.” And I think that NFT is really one facet of that.
But I think there’s just been a kind of general wave of “Okay, we have all of these connections that we’re forming and communities that we’re forming, and spaces that we’re forming” and to me that’s really exciting and strange and interesting for sure.
Abigail: Yeah, and what do you think about this Che-Yu? As you have recently travelled quite a bit between New York and Taiwan, after living in New York, how different is it?
Che-Yu: Yeah, I think people in Taiwan and also in New York have different approaches and different understandings for NFTs. So I think in Asian countries or in Taiwan, most of the media focus on how you can earn a lot on NFT, but I really don’t like that approach. And I like the feeling and also how we discuss NFT and how we discuss arts in New York and also in the US or in Europe. I think it’s a very unique experience because NFT and blockchain technology were able to transform a lot of different artists on-chain and also this trend helped us to understand more about and also have the space to discuss about this artist.
Artists are separated everywhere in the world. The distance between the artists (and those) who collect the art are very far, where are now we can directly discuss new purchases of digital art from artists and having connections through that.
Abigail: Yeah, that’s great. I would love to bring the next question into both of your artworks in our show, and for the audience that is listening both Zach and Che-Yu are gonna be exhibiting in our show that launches September 13th here in London at Unit London called In Our Code. And so they’re both showcasing generative artworks and I would say both of your works have a sense of musicality to them in a form of movement and dynamism and a sense of lyricism. So I’d love to know how both of you imbue this emotion into your artwork, because you both have spoken about that in the past, and I would just love to know more about that process and what it means?
Zach: Yeah, I think my work is oftentimes about finding beauty with maths. So everything that I do, some stuff I do is interactive or uses different types of inputs like cameras and microphones and so on. But a lot of the generative work that I do is just about numbers and trying to find something that is organic and absurd and interesting with maths.
And my piece for this show is based on a light simulation. It’s an algorithm for simulating light where for every pixel you shoot off in random directions and you say, what am I looking at? What is near me? And what colour is it? And so you’re at a per pixel level, simulating or imagining what the light sources would colour this pixel. And then, the elements that are creating the light are moving in this circular pattern. It’s really a sphere that has a bit of wobbliness to it. It’s not a geometric primitive, but it’s based on a geometric primitive.
So the whole idea is to take something really universal, like a globe or a sphere and just rotate it and see the lights that it creates. And for me, I really like playing with this tension between something which is really purely mathematical and that is really organic and has little sub motions and little things happening, and that is the kind of interesting tension in this work. Those little subtle movements change the pieces. So to me there’s a really direct connection between movement and feeling, and you can create and convey a lot of different emotions through movement. So I’m excited to bring that to this exhibition.
Abigail: Yeah, and Che-Yu I know that you play with velocity and movement of the particles and that’s how you imbue your emotion as well as in that movement. I would love for you to walk us through that process as well, and how you use this work as a diary?
Che-Yu: So actually I started intensely creating this kind of creative coding work since Covid. That’s why I have a lot of emotions to put into it, desperately. I will start from a simple idea. Like, I want to make lights, I want to make a ball like moving around, I want to make a tree or something I see in my life. And then after that I will start from this idea to make a prototype. and I will feel what I want to express in this work. So it’s a dynamic and organic process. After that I’ll feel like, “Oh, maybe it can use some different colour palette and a different form or it can add some interactive factor that users can interact with.”
So for this work in the exhibition, it’s a particle simulation. I really like to simulate something, I like to design a system or design a sub universe and then set the initial condition of all the particles or all the elements inside it, and then allow them to interact with each other or allow them to be affected by this space.
And I really like that unpredictable result from this kind of experiment and see what this code and this art can finally become. In this organic process, I would just adjust it and feel it and then get the final result to see how the final representation of this emotion and of this idea.
Abigail: Transitioning into the poetry elements of creative coding, which I think is evident in both of your works. What is the relationship for you both, with poetry? And how do you combine this within your practice?
Zach: Yeah, I teach at the MIT Media Lab and at the Media Lab there’s a phrase that’s really well known or very popular there, which is called “Demo or Die”. And the idea is that you always need to demonstrate you’re working on some new technology, you need to make a demo of it.
And the word “DEMO”, if you take those letters and flip them around, take the D and flip it upside down to turn it into a P, like you can rearrange the letters and make the word “POEM”. I often think about this difference between a demo and a poem. A demo is a demonstration of a technology, it’s kind of showing you, “Okay, here’s a cool particle system, or a different algorithm, here’s a demonstration of what this algorithm could do.” A poem is actually speaking with the art first, with “What is it that you want to convey about what it means to be human and what it means to be alive?”
And so I’d like to focus on the word poetry because it is a reminder for the technology to be in service of the art. That the art and what you want to convey and the meaning that you want to convey should be in the lead and the technology’s in service of it. And I think just the comparison between the word poem and demo is a good reminder, kind of, are we trying to make demos? Or are we trying to make poems? And that’s the question that I ask myself pretty much every day.
Che-Yu: Yeah, I think it’s pretty inspiring, and also I saw that on YouTube.
Zach: Yeah.
Che-Yu: The speech.
Abigail: It’s really good.
Che-Yu: It’s really good.
Abigail: We’ll put it in the description for the audience.
Che-Yu: Yeah, so I think that because I started from a more technical background, when I first start making something, I feel that there’s something lacking in the work. And I cannot describe it, but it feels like it’s lacking the soul, and I try to find out what that is. Because everyone can make something, by sine and cosine wave, by the noise. That’s just a tool and just like Zach told us, it’s just a demo. So I think it’s our subjective thinking of what does it feel like, or what does it mean to you? So, I started making works with a more specific emotion. I draw words by particles called Cow’s Dancer or draw strange robots, meaning, I create a lot of robot hats, that is the Sea Hams on ArtBlocks. That means that everyone is different, so I draw generative robots that have different phases and they can generate infinite robot hats. I like to explore this kind of symbols and how we can express our life experience in this work and I think that is the poem.
Abigail: Yeah, and I think that’s what In Our Code this exhibition is all about. It’s really looking at the creator, taking a step back and looking at the input-output relationship. I think coming from the traditional art world, there are so many people that look at generative art and say, “Oh, it can’t be art because the computer is actually making it.” What do you guys say in response to that, if someone who might not be familiar with generative art? What is it to you both?
Zach: I don’t even know how to respond to that, I mean, that’s such a …
Abigail: There’s so many people saying this nowadays, it’s like, “Oh, it can’t be art because it’s the computer deciding this randomness; the computer has the final say.”
Zach: Yeah, I don’t know, it’s a tool like any other tool. To me, it’s like having a debate about pigments or paint brushes or something. At some point, things feel really radical, to have coloured lights in theatre.
Now you wouldn’t think twice about that, right? But that was really shocking to have lights that had colour on them on stage. So I think it’s, I don’t even know how to respond to that. To me, that just seems like such a ludicrous statement. There are people behind these algorithms, right? There are people who are using these algorithms, this code, and this language, this creative coding language to express themselves. So I think the sentiment that, “computers made this so it’s not art” is just really profoundly wrong that I don’t know how to articulate it. People made the computers, people are writing software to use these machines to do things, and that’s really interesting. And I think it’s important to maybe stress that artists should be there, artists should be probing these technologies and seeing what’s possible with them and expressing with them. Otherwise what are these machines here for? Just selling us ads? Tracking what we do online? Actually having artists at the table allows us to see what the possibilities and the limits and the edges and the fuzzy spaces are. So, I think that is a ludicrous statement. I don’t know how to talk about it.
Che-Yu: Yeah, I agree with that. I think like the things are tools. AI is a tool, someone make art with MidJourney, some make with Photoshop, it’s just a tool. Also I like that the medium idea, art can express or exist in all the different mediums. Creative coding, computer arts are just a medium that people can play on, but the core of that is people’s thoughts and how they play with that, how we create art. Maybe there are some convenient ways to create art, like a computer drawing something for us, but the initial idea of that, people start to think they want to make something, that is the art itself.
Abigail: Yeah, and we couldn’t agree with both of you more and that’s what we want to bring generative art to the forefront, especially during Frieze week here in London. Both of you have created very interactive experiences, incorporating public participation. Can both of you give examples of these projects? And more importantly, why do you think public participation is important in certain artwork?
Zach: I came up in the Ars Electronica world making interactive work and started working with Golan Levin, who was one of my teachers. We started working together and making projects at Ars Electronica and media art festivals – a lot of our projects at that time. We continued to make work that’s interactive, that is about using your body, taking your voice as input, or your movement as input, or drawings as input, or just something that you bring to it and that you really are creating a feedback loop with the audience where the artwork really doesn’t exist or doesn’t do much until you come. And it’s this weird art form that’s about agency, that’s about expression, that’s about creation and co-creation with the audience member, inviting them to be participants. An example of an interactive work, and actually I’m gonna present this in Taiwan in December so I’m excited to be talking to Che-Yu today is a project called Reflection Studies. It’s based on a lot of software studies of light and reflection, and I have so much fun with it, and I want the audience to be able to enjoy that, and play with it, and in the same way that I do when I’m doing my daily sketches.
So I built a light table, within, I laser cut a bunch of pieces, like letters of the alphabet and geometric shapes and invite the public to put down the pieces on the light table and then the software is simulating what it would look like if light was actually reflecting off of those pieces. So rays of light bouncing and there’s a button you can change the light behaviour. And what I love about this interactive work is that it’s immediately understandable. You come to it, you see there’s a camera, you put your hand down on the table and you see yourself. And you can understand. “I put something on this light table and the visuals are going to change.”
So it starts with the body, and then goes to the brain and people are trying to figure out, “okay, oh, if the light is moving this way, this is how I can trap it, let me build a little channel for the light to move in.” And then it goes back to the body and I don’t know how to articulate it, but it’s this kind of body, mind, body circle that happens with interactive work that I think’s really profound. It starts with the idea that you’re physically present and you’re touching and interacting with the artwork, the idea cycles between the body and mind.
Abigail: It’s very cybernetic in that sense, very cool. And then Che-Yu, can you talk about some of your projects? I’m very familiar with SoulFish. I own one, and I go in and move it occasionally through the screen and so I’d love to talk about those projects?
Che-Yu: Yeah, I really like the interactivity part of the project, and different approaches. One is I like my work to be interactive in real time, so people can play with it and also you can hear the sound it’s making. I designed the chord, and also people can just move the fish around. aWhen the bubble touches the fish, it will generate another note so it’s always different and random music.
Abigail: Yeah, and for those who don’t know, SoulFish is one of Che-Yu’s projects on FxHash. Just wanted to put that out there for context that we’re speaking about here as well.
Che-Yu: Yeah, so even in my ArtBlocks work Electriz, I keep all the things evolving and very dynamic rather than a static image. And I think the most special experience of this is that I made a solo exhibition in Taiwan in Taipei 101 in May. And then in that exhibition, I first project my works on a large screen and also in the immersive space. That’s the first time I feel that, it feels really different when people are really engaged and also immersed and just all the arts are surrounding you and on a different scale. It feels different from seeing images on the website. In that show I also make interactive music so I’m also doing music production and making a lot of DJ experience in that show. That’s when I start feeling that maybe there can be more of this kind of art. There is some intuitive part for people to directly feel the art, when they see the art, and when their action can somehow affect how the art form is changing.
Abigail: Great, do you both think that this year, really fully coming out of Covid completely, that physical exhibitions are quite important to further generative art as an art form?
Zach: Yeah, I think there’s been such a big excitement and investment in this form and the majority of the work is displayed and consumed online and on social media and so on. There’s something so different about seeing work at different scales and actually being face to face with work, and being in a space with other people and I think the power of art is you can go somewhere and feel something different. I had this experience where I was walking around the MoMA recently where every piece made me feel really different.
When this work is consumed, you’re scrolling through Instagram, you’re looking on Twitter. There’s not a context to actually just have an engagement and just the moment with the work and to actually let it speak to you. So for me the actual exhibitions with this work where you can have a conversation with it and really give yourself to the work and the time and the space to interpret the work, to me, that’s really important. I’m super excited about it, although this is a very cool and interesting space to have all of this work online and on social media. To me, there’s nothing beats being in a physical space.
Che-Yu: Yeah. I also really like when you see the physical artwork or when it’s presented in the physical world. I feel like it speaks more when it’s only on Instagram or on a website.
Zach: I think there’s also something really profound in seeing other people see the work. It’s not just seeing the work, but actually like,
Che-Yu: Actually see someone, see your work .
Zach: Yeah. And see someone’s reaction also. Also, you’re walking around an exhibit and there’s somebody else in the room and what are they stopping at? Sometimes they’re blocking your view or whatever. And just the idea that you’re in a space with other people. So much of this has been online, and in social media and in this context, but to have real exhibitions with this work is very important.
Che-Yu: Yeah.
Zach: Yeah.
Che-Yu: Yeah, to me coming from an Electrical Engineering background, it’s hard for me to find friends, people who are also making this kind of art. So when I had that exhibition, I really felt a lot when people saw my work and gave me feedback. They really love the fish, they really like which work and how this makes them feel.
Abigail: Yeah, and that’s why we’re so excited for In Our Code. We’re setting up the exhibition so the audience will have to weave through the whole room. And each artist gets their own private viewing room that the viewer steps into this input-output relationship physically.
So, on one side, they’ll see your guys’ artwork, and then on the other side they’ll see the objects that you’ve chosen to represent your input. I would love while we have you both here to talk about your input into the artworks for this show?
Zach: Yeah, Che-Yu do you want to? I’m gonna look something up. Sorry, I just wanna make sure I have the right name so, I don’t know if Che-Yu, you wanna talk about it?
Che-Yu: Yeah, so in my work, I’m influenced a lot by Impressionism. The first inspiration in input is Starry Night by Van Gogh and I like Impressionism because the technique of creating Impressionism art is similar to generative art.
Traditional artists pick up some pixels and colours in their real life, and they change the hue a little bit, they change the brightness a little bit and try to use different strokes like water colour or different brush to reproduce this in their art.
So this is the transforming machine between the input and output, just like when we are creating coding art. So that’s the first inspiration and input. And then after I created the first version of that, I simulate the particles and I feel that, it feels like the mountains and villages.
So, that’s why I started finding different mountains and villages around the world and started finding what this looks like. Maybe I can place some trees, maybe I can add some windows to those wavy shapes, so it links more to people’s memory about what they see in their real life.
Yeah, and finally I picked some vibrant colours. So I referenced some colours, from traditional Chinese temples, and also a little bit from Mexican culture, so that’s a mixture of the vibrant colours of different cultures but they all use vibrant colours. But they didn’t fight with each other. So, I’m really excited to create a work with such vibrant colour and reminds me of some imaginary village, so I called it Fairy Village. It’s still very generative art, you can see it’s made by some waves and being bound by maths and physical rules.
Zach: So, I looked up the piece and, I hope we have the ability to show this work, but it’s a film from 1963 by Edward Zajac. I hope I’m pronouncing that right. It’s the first computer-animated film. It was created at Bell Labs and it’s a one and a half minute film. The film is called Simulation of a Two-Gyro Gravity-Gradient Attitude Control System. It’s basically a spinning sphere with what looks like a satellite moving around it and a clock. And I see this film a lot because I teach a class called “Recreating the Past”, and in the class we recreate artworks from artists from the past. So for example, Ken Knowlton, who recently passed away, was a researcher at Bell Labs and did a lot of work with pixels and mosaics.
We study his work and we recreate his work and there’s a film called The Incredible Machines from 1968 that’s all about Bell Labs and the kind of interesting and weird stuff that they were making there. This film from Zajac is in that film. I teach this class every semester, so I’ve seen this film numerous times.
What I love about it is that it’s the first animated film and it’s just this spinning sphere and it is the kind of root of what I’m doing with my piece, which is spinning the sphere of points. I think when you find these references from history, you can make work that’s in conversation with them. You can have a kind of dialogue or conversation with artwork and artists that have come before and try to imagine them in today’s voice with today’s tools, with today’s energy, and I try to encourage my students to do that as well.
I think a lot of times in this technical field, we have a tendency to think about the future and talk about the future. “Oh, this is what the world’s gonna look like in 10 years or a hundred years, etcetera.” I often find the best ideas and the best inspiration come from looking at the past.
Here’s the first computer animated film from 1963, and maybe I can create work that’s in that kind of conversation with that. So, I don’t know if we have the rights to show that work, I’m not sure, but if we can, what I love about it is that I tried to make my piece exactly the same length and it’s having a conversation with history.
Abigail: Really thankful you brought up your work at MIT Media Lab. Because I wanted to segue into how both of you are teaching the next generation of creative coders and what is that process like? Why do you think it’s important?
Che-Yu: I actually opened an online course, actually I have several online courses. First one is about dynamic websites. After I studied at New York University I learned that what I created before is actually creative coding already.
So, after I learned all the things in New York University and also being a teaching assistant for two years at creative coding classes. I organise those creative methods and how to combine and make them into art. For me and for new students, I think it’s often hard for them to refine their work from a prototype to what seems more complete. So the distance between how to make it more complete is some technique, and also how to make it more detailed and how to use different colours, how to use different techniques to create this art, like particles or also mathematical formulas.
In the lessons I design I often let students learn only techniques. But I like to let people know you need to have something in mind to create first, and then I can teach you how to use those tools to reach your final goal and how to express yourself. But I will not affect what you want to express. So, I will just ask them a lot of different questions, what will they want to approach? Do they have different inspirations from their mood boards? And things they want to explore.
Abigail: Yes.
Zach: Yeah, in terms of my teaching, I mentioned this class “Recreating the Past” and in the class every week I talk about a different artist and designer that relates to the roots of computational art. So for example, I start with Vera Molnar, who is a Hungarian-born artist living in Paris now and since the 70s she’s been writing code to control a pen plotter to make these beautiful drawings that have a lot to show us about the relationship of order and chaos. So we use her work as a chance to talk about randomness and noise. John Whitney, who’s a filmmaker who would take decommissioned, analogue computers and repurpose them, making these kinds of animation machines. We study Muriel Cooper who helped create the MIT Media Lab, and the work of our students is really important in the development of typography and the relationship of computation and typography. So each week gives us a chance to focus on or think about a different technical concept.
But what I love more than anything, throughout the weeks I’m giving these personal stories, like Ken Knowlton is an artist who I had a chance to work with. So I will talk a little bit about my experiences or other artists that I bumped into. I saw their work at an exhibition and it really meant a lot to me, so I will try to tell that story. But the last week of class, I asked students to pick an artist and recreate their work, and that’s my favourite week of class because then I’m so excited they bring in all of these really different artists that mean a lot to them, and they’re having a conversation with those artists.
I think a lot about this book that I really love called A New Program for Graphic Design by David Reinfurt, and he’s talking about these designers that I love, like Muriel Cooper. in the introduction he says, “I want you to read this book, then I want you to rip it up and write your own book,” which I think is such a beautiful sentiment and that’s how I feel about the class is that I want to I go through these artists and they’re really heroes to me, but I want the students to find their own heroes. I love the last week because then it’s really that you can see the start of that journey of them having this conversation with and recreating these works from different artists.
Abigail: Amazing, and thank you both. So we’re coming to our last questions now, and we’re gonna be doing this for each podcast episode we do. So we have three more questions, and the only thing we ask is in your answer, either answer it in one sentence or one word. And so we’ll just do back and forth as we work through these three. So the first one is, what inspires you in this space? And we’ll start with you, Zach.
Zach: Experimentation.
Che-Yu: Simulation.
Abigail: Okay, our second question, what is one artist you would love to own an NFT by?
Zach: Vera Molnar.
Che-Yu: Tyler Hobbs.
Abigail: Both, great choices by the way, the last one, what technological advancements do you think the space needs? This is a tough one.
Zach: Yeah, I think we need new technologies for showing, engaging and living with this kind of artwork.
Abigail: Amazing, and Che-Yu?.
Che-Yu: I’m also thinking of a new medium with technology to allow people to intuitively feel and engage with their work.
Abigail: Well, amazing. Thank you both. Thank you again, Zach and Che-Yu.
Zach: Yeah, thanks for having us.
Che-Yu: Thank you.