My motto is simple: Make something new out of something old. Every day I’m often taking code from the day before, and remixing it to see what it tells me.
- Zach Lieberman
Nguyen Wahed is pleased to present Daily Sketches, a survey of Zach Lieberman's landmark daily sketching practice, a decade-long commitment to creating and publishing a small digital experiment to social media every single day. This exhibition brings together a carefully selected archive from that ongoing project, revealing how a methodical, deliberate practice accumulates into something far more profound than the sum of its daily outputs.
For over ten years, Lieberman has approached coding as a form of daily writing: what he frames as a poetic rather than technical endeavor. Each sketch explores the elemental possibilities of computation: how code shapes movement, color, light, and form. The works displayed here trace a consistent thread: a fascination with curves that bend and flow, with systems that evolve through simple rules, with the way computational logic can generate organic, almost living visual phenomena. There is no grand narrative here, no arc toward mastery or technological breakthrough. Instead, what emerges is something closer to a visual diary: a decade of sustained experimentation, failure, refinement, and discovery.
The exhibition resists the tendency to treat computational art as spectacle. Rather than showcasing technical virtuosity or the novelty of digital media, these works ask us to look at code as a genuine creative medium, one capable of capturing poetry, subtlety, and surprise in equal measure to paint or pencil. Lieberman's sketches demonstrate what he has long argued: that computation is fundamentally about making, thinking, and seeing differently, not merely about displaying what machines can do.
The daily sketches project itself, which began in 2016, represents a deliberate turn away from the exhibition object as primary output. Instead, Lieberman treats Instagram, a platform typically associated with consumption and spectacle, as a intimate studio journal, a space for experimentation without the weight of the finished artwork. In doing so, he has quietly inverted how we think about artistic presence online: not as marketing, but as authentic practice made visible.
Artist Statement:
As a creator, there are always voices in the back of your head telling you, “It’s not good enough” or “people will think it’s silly” or “you’re misjudging this.” I feel my job as a creator is to silence these voices (as much as possible) to the point where my head is almost empty. I can’t stress this enough, that single voice needs to be your guiding light. That voice might be your intuition, your curiosity, your love for the medium or the spirit that got you started. But whatever that is, that is something you need to protect dearly, like an exposed candle flame in the wind.
About the artist:
Zach Lieberman (b. 1977) is an artist, researcher, and educator whose twenty-year practice spans computer graphics, animation, interactive design, and—crucially—pedagogy. His work has consistently examined human-machine relations with playfulness and conceptual depth, treating technology not as an end in itself but as a medium for lyrical expression.
Lieberman is perhaps best known as co-creator of openFrameworks, an open-source C++ toolkit for creative coding that has become foundational infrastructure for artists working with code worldwide. He has made it his life's work to democratize access to computational tools, a philosophy that extends from his co-founding of the School for Poetic Computation in 2013 (after a decade teaching at Parsons School of Design) to his current role as professor at MIT's Media Lab, where he leads the Future Sketches research group.
His practice has earned significant institutional recognition: a Golden Nica award from Ars Electronica, inclusion on Fast Company's list of most creative people, and exhibitions at major institutions including MoMA, the Exploratorium, and international galleries. Yet his influence arguably runs deeper through the countless artists, students, and practitioners who have learned to think about code as a creative language through his teaching and his generosity in sharing ideas.