Gadgetory

the Verge's partnering with this year's inaugural panorama music festival in New York City and we're going to be hosting the lab an incredible interactive art space running all weekend long we spoke to Zack Lieberman an artist with work in this year's space his piece is called reflection studies as an artist I'm really interested in exploring how people communicate there's so many interesting properties of light when you think about reflection or refraction the way light looks like when it's moving through a glass of water for me that those aren't really beautiful so I started to experiment with those and invite other people to try it so we have a light table which is illuminated from below and then there's these cut pieces of plexiglass and then we have a camera above that sort of watching the scene and I've written software that analyzes the data from the camera and uses that geometry with this light simulation really interested in very primitive geometry so taking things like circles and squares and rectangles and arcs and also typography and then in a lot of ways there's this joy even this magic of likes they put their hands down and the light comes into their hands and it feels like they're holding lights and you can see people's eyes light up when they're using it how many times have you been to a museum and it says do not touch but I always want to just have signs that say please touch and I'm really interested in just this notion of using code to make poetry for this kind of projects I really love having them in a festival having them in a place where there's a lot of people it where it's unexpected to encounter art you know you go to a museum you know you're going to see our work but if you go to a music festival you've seen a band or you like waiting you know for some set to come on and like you turn the corner and there's an artwork when i'm doing this animation when I'm creating these software studies for me it's a form of music I just hope that people have fun and perform with it you know part of it is that you're a bit when you use it you're lit up and so it's like you're on stage and you're kind of performing and jamming the most exciting thing about this medium is to build these systems and then I'm constantly surprised by what the audience does I'm constantly surprised by what the participants do when they're using these things