BODY SKETCHES

Zach Lieberman

FILE SÃO PAULO 2026: Inter-creativity – Art and Technology – Installations
Electronic Language International Festival

Body Sketches – United States

American artist Zachary Lieberman explores the poetry of code. In this interactive installation, visitors’ movements and gestures are transformed into digital drawings generated in real time. Every interaction is unique and disappears in the same moment the spectators change position. 

Within the exhibition, the work serves as a metaphor of a personal imprint in the future. Every visitor leaves a trace that instantly changes the environment around them, becoming part of a shared story.

BIO

Zach Lieberman is a pioneer of creative coding, turning invisible forces into interactive digital poetry.

This research used stigmergy behaviour, another example of agency-based systems, which could be programmed to be highly adaptive to local data. What is most intriguing and attractive in this case, is contrasting organic aesthetics emerging from algorithms like stigmergy, with its plant like formations, and the hyper-rationalisation and genericity of voxelised geometry. Different resolutions were introduced in the facade panels, by using an octree algorithm. The result is a building skin that from afar looks like a plant, but in close up has almost Minecraft-like aesthetics coming from a multi-resolution voxel field. Organic stigmergy (stígma + ergon) partly plays a role in the distribution of data through the facade field, rather than generating geometry. It leaves its imprint in the density of geometry

도시의 흔적
“”새로운 도시화가… 더 이상 다소 영구적인 배치에 관심을 두지 않고 … 결정적인 형태로 결정화되기를 거부하는 … 그것은 더 이상 세심한 정의, 한계의 부과가 아니라 개념 확장, 경계 거부, 개체 분리 및 식별이 아니라 하이브리드 발견에 관한 것입니다. 그것은 더 이상 도시에 집착하지 않고 끝없는 강화와 다양화, 지름길과 재분배를 위한 기반 시설의 조작 – 심리적 공간의 재창조.”, 네덜란드 건축가 + 하버드 교수, Koolhaas 959, Deliious New York의 작가. URBAN IMPRINT는 우리가 정의하는 이 새로운 도시주의, 증강된 물질성을 디자인하는 방법입니다. 미래의 나에 의해 재구성되는 ‘빈 캔버스’인 환경.

Urban imprint
“If there is to be a “new urbanism… it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent … but for the creation of enabling fields….that refuse to be crystallized into definitive form; it will no longer be about meticulous definitions, the imposition of limits, but about expanding notions, denying boundaries, not about separating and identifying entities, but about discovering hybrids; it will no longer be obsessed with the city but with the manipulation of infrastructure for endless intensifications and diversifications, shortcuts and redistributions – the reinvention of psychological space.”, Dutch architect + Harvard Professor, Koolhaas 959, writer of Delirious New York. URBAN IMPRINT is how we design a piece of this new urbanism, an augmented materiality , as we define it. An environment that is a ‘blank canvas’ to be reshaped by the future self.

天堂之城
MVRDV的The Imprint是更大的天堂城市综合大楼的一部分，该大楼共有6栋建筑物，该大楼将提供全套​​娱乐场所和酒店景点，距离韩国最大的机场不到一公里。鉴于拟议的两座建筑物的计划–一家夜总会和室内主题公园–客户需要没有窗户的设计，而该建筑物仍与综合大楼中的其他建筑物结合在一起。

Mirror Matter
In the neutrino observatory rendered in Mirror Matter, slow panning movement gives a sense of the immensity of the nearly 13,000 photo-multipliers that inhabit this strange vessel – their ‘eyes’ engineered to watch light. Another frame depicts the Hadron Collider at CERN; its architecture envisioned through lidar scans, producing a dynamic, transparent imprint in three dimensions. Described as a vision that flows through the body, it is imagined by Škarnulytė as ‘alien archaeological vision’ with the ability to see through, and as the experience of sight farthest from the human realm. Through simultaneous perspectives, the constant surveying motion that weaves a continues thread through each video narrative, and the immersion generated by the reflective black ceiling, the viewer is imparted with this panoptical mode of perception.

Jean Philippe Jacquot, Alexandre Rivaux & Gustave Bernier
Passage
file festival

Held at the “Carrousel du Louvre” (Paris), “Passage” is a sensitive setup that decrypts the visual and sound imprint of those who step near it. This room is a representation of the data we leave in spite of ourselves, at each of our visits on the web.

FALIN MYND
Falin Mynd is an audiovisual installation dedicated to the city of Milan that draws inspiration from the concept of the latent image in the photographic field: an invisible imprint left by the light on the film that is revealed only after its development. Similarly, the data generated by the inhabitants and visitors of the city of Milan produce abstract digital landscapes, leaving a trace from their analysis and interpretation in real-time. In this way, the work makes visible the indissoluble bond between individual and community, highlighting how the two entities influence one another changing the perception of the reality surrounding us made of places, people, colors, and sensations. The data thus constitute an invisible image of the city, a map of what is not manifest and which is revealed in Falin Mynd.

Energie!
Thorsten Fleisch creates films that reveal the shapes and patterns of natural forces and phenomena. In this work he reveals what energy in one of its simplest forms looks like in motion. Energie! is a sequence of still images created on light-sensitive photographic paper. The artist exposed dozens of sheets of paper to enormous electrical discharges, each leaving its imprint as a trail of light. Animating these images reveals patterns in their flow of energy, akin to tracing the flow of electricity at each moment of a lightning strike. As the images are photographs created without cameras, they are records of single moments. Accordingly we see dozens of split-second documents animated to reveal the shape and power of energy.

Paradise City
MVRDV’s The Imprint is part of the larger Paradise City complex of 6 buildings in total, which will provide a full suite of entertainment and hotel attractions less than a kilometre away from South Korea’s largest airport. Given the proposed programme of the 2 buildings – a nightclub and indoor theme park – the client required a design with no windows, yet one that still integrated with the other buildings in the complex.

ondulation

We enter a room and are plunged into semi-darkness. The room is dominated by an immense basin of water, ripples radiating across its surface in concentric rings. Intuitively we know that the sounds around us are closely related to the ripples, a fact reinforced by the water’s reflected movements on the surrounding walls through a sophisticated play of light. As we get closer, it becomes clear that the sounds are emanating from speakers concealed under the basin, the source of the ripples on the water’s surface. The water acts as a medium in the sense that it acts as middle ground: stimulated by the sound and swept by the beams of light, it produces richly evocative reflections. A latent photographic metaphor is at play in the installation: the water seems to take on the properties of a sensitive plate, with the sound imprinted upon it and revealed by the movement and stunning reflections projected on the walls.

feel Me tactile interactive bed
File Festival
“feelMe” is a work that for the first time remotely transmits the tactile sensation. Our work provokes the exploration of the sense of touch while promoting the interaction between two people mediated by a machine. The work is constituted of two surfaces, or “beds”: the first one (tactile transmission unit), in which one of the participants, layed down, imprints marks to its surface by pressing it with the weight and movement of the different parts of his/her body; these impressions will be captured and transmitted to the other participant, who lies in the second “bed” (tactile reception unit) and receives them simultaneously in the same positions and in proportional intensities, however, in negative, that is, when the surface in the first bed sinks, it rises in the second one, promoting a touch. The first body touches the second one, and the “beds” may be a few meters or thousands of kilometers apart from each other. Between the bodies, dozens of occult sensors, microcontrollers, engines (lineal actors), computers and a program that orchestrates that tactile communication. We allow the participant to experiment the possibilities of encounter between bodies through the digital world, with a different approach from the one provided by virtual reality. We want to explore the tactile perception separately in its “corporal way”, and only in future works to propose the expansion/extension of multimedia perception with the inclusion of tactile perception.