Body is the Interface workshop (Zach Lieberman <> tiat)

This hands-on workshop explores how the body can become an expressive tool for creative computation. Using p5.js and machine learning techniques like pose estimation, participants will learn how to connect movement and gesture to dynamic visual outputs. We’ll focus especially on the intersection of typography and the body, creating systems where physical motion shapes, distorts, or animates text. Participants will also explore interaction techniques like gesture recognition and body-based input to design playful, poetic, and embodied interfaces. No prior experience with machine learning is necessary, just curiosity and a willingness to move. Zach Lieberman is an artist, researcher, and educator with a simple goal: he wants you surprised. In his work, he creates performances and installations that take human gesture as input and amplify them in different ways — making drawings come to life, imagining what the voice might look like, and transforming people’s silhouettes into music. He’s been listed as one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People, he’s won the Golden Nica from Ars Electronica, Interactive Design of the Year from Design Museum London as well as listed in Time Magazine’s Inventions of the Year. He creates artwork through writing software and is a co-creator of openFrameworks, an open source C++ toolkit for creative coding and helped co-found the School for Poetic Computation, a school examining the lyrical possibilities of code. He is a professor at MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Future Sketches group, and is a member of AGI (Alliance Graphique International). This workshop will be hosted at tiat! tiat is the intersection of art and technology! we are a 501c3 nonprofit for creative technologists to experiment, exhibit, and expand their practice. ⋆౨ৎ˚⟡˖ more on tiat instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tiat.place