Zach Lieberman (co-founder) — openFrameworks released

2005

Artists: Zach Lieberman (co-founder), Theo Watson (co-founder), Arturo Castro (co-founder) · Year: 2005 · Medium: C++ creative-coding toolkit · Substrate: C++ wrappers around OpenGL, OpenCV, FreeType, FFmpeg, and other system libraries; sketch-style API · Place: New York / international · Institution: Self-organized open-source project openFrameworks, released in 2005 by Zach Lieberman, Theo Watson, and Arturo Castro, is a C++ toolkit for creative coding — functionally a C++ cousin of Processing, with the same sketch structure, the same approachable drawing primitives, the same emphasis on getting artists coding quickly. But where Processing runs on the Java Virtual Machine and is appropriate for small to medium installations, openFrameworks runs on native C++ and is appropriate for high-performance applications — large-scale installations, real-time video processing, complex interactive systems. The toolkit was born out of Lieberman's frustration teaching at Parsons, where his students needed to work with libraries (OpenCV, OpenGL, FFmpeg) that Processing at the time could not easily reach. openFrameworks provided a unified C++ wrapper around those libraries, making them available through a Processing-like interface. The toolkit's release accelerated a generation of interactive installation artists who needed C++ performance without wanting to write C++ infrastructure from scratch. Lieberman, Watson, Castro, and the subsequent openFrameworks community built the toolkit as free and open-source software. The project has remained continuously developed for twenty years. Major contemporary interactive-installation artists — Rafaël Lozano-Hemmer, Memo Akten, Kyle McDonald, and many others — work in openFrameworks as their primary tool. openFrameworks and Processing together form the software infrastructure of the creative-coding era. Between them, they have been the primary coding environment for an entire generation of digital artists. Lore Lieberman and Watson met through the Parsons new-media program in New York in the mid-2000s. Arturo Castro joined the project from Spain. The openFrameworks annual meeting — openFrameworks Lab — ran from 2008 through the late 2010s as a kind of developer-artist retreat. The toolkit has been ported to multiple platforms including web (via Emscripten) and embedded systems. Lieberman has taught at SFPC (School for Poetic Computation), a creative-coding school he co-founded in New York. Sources • openFrameworks project (openframeworks.cc) • Lieberman, Zach — lectures and SFPC materials • Castro, Arturo — arturocastro.net