This question motivates the work of the Future Sketches group at the MIT Media Lab. Led by artist and educator Zach Lieberman, the group aims to help us to “see” code by using it to make artistically controlled, computer-generated visuals.

The visual forms in this exhibition are drawn from typography and created digitally with a variety of programming languages. Just like moving a word can change the meaning of a sentence, small tweaks to code can yield vastly different results. Creative coding welcomes the unexpected variety and surprising outcomes that arise from these small adjustments. In this art, language is both the paint and the canvas.

Though made with some of the latest digital tools, the work of Future Sketches is rooted in a long tradition of systematic approaches to making art. Small mutations and transformations generate patterns that an artist might not have imagined otherwise, and the results can inspire surprise and wonder. Future Sketches achieves this by using tools that already exist and by designing, building, and supporting new tools for the next generation of computational artistic expression.

Zach Lieberman
Body Sketches (Type), 2024
Digital interactive

How can human action be recognized and transformed by code? Lieberman explores a variety of open-ended questions like this through his process of sketching. Like a pencil sketch, Lieberman’s code sketches are made relatively quickly and are a way for him to test an initial idea that he can then develop further. He often connects sketches to movement and the human body as way of exploring computation and typography through gestural expression.

Vera van de Seyp
Knitted Type, 2023
Machine-knitted yarn on wood frame

This work began as a digital animation exploring the movement of letterforms. Van de Seyp then created a browser-based tool that reworks an animation into a sequence of still images. She developed another tool able to convert the grid of pixels from the still images into the grid of a knitting pattern. Using a modified 1980s programmable knitting machine, she produced knitted matrices like the one on view here. Interested in returning the work to its original format and exploring how translation and mediation might impact design, van de Seyp photographed the knitted work and stitched it back together into a flipbook-like animation.

Lingdong Huang
Bendy Type, 2024
3D-printed plastic filament

Huang developed a curious algorithm capable of generating a morph from any shape to any shape. Applied to typography, the morph allows for a smooth and seamless connection from one letter to another. The animation shows examples of these gradual transformations on screen. 3D prints of the experiments create typographic sculptures that present the curves of letters in tangible form.

Char Stiles
Olympic Forms, 2024
Digital interactive

This typeface was created by processing footage of Olympic athletes through an application built with openFrameworks and OpenCV. Using a body segmentation algorithm, the app isolated athletes’ outlines from the Paris 2024 Olympics video stream. Each outline was then compared to the shapes of letters in the official Paris Olympics font. The resulting typeface captures the moments when athletes’ poses most closely resembled each letter, with sports like gymnastics, skateboarding, and breaking yielding the best matches.

Zach Lieberman
Type World, 2016–2024
Three-channel video with sound by Daito Manabe, 8:00

How do designers transform type? How does type transform us? In this immersive animation, Lieberman creates a mesmerizing world where shapes become letters, letters become words, and words become sentences. Rather than a narrative video with a specific story to follow, Lieberman has described his animations as “moving paintings”—visual environments that explore graphical form, generative design, computation, and typographic expression.

Experiments in Typography from the Future Sketches group

1. Vera van de Seyp, Assorted Type Tools, 2023–2024

2. Lingdong Huang, Alternative Type Exploration, 2024

3. Vera van de Seyp, 36 Days of Type, 2023

4. Vera van de Seyp, Tomorrow’s Typography, 2023–2024

5. Lingdong Huang, Photographic Inverse Kinematics, 2024

6. Lingdong Huang and Vera van de Seyp, Body Type, 2022

7. Char Stiles, FKA ASCII, 2023

8. Zach Lieberman, AR Type Experiments, 2022