AM: Pre-designed software, be it commercial or open source, pre-supposes how users intend to interact with it, what they want to do, and how they ought to do it, what the pipeline and the process ought to be.
M: Whenever I need a new functionality, I immediately try to design a simple re-usable API for it. I absolutely HATE copy / pasting code between projects, or even within a single project.
DP: It’s a practice. Space filling algorithms. Patterns of growth. At any given point in time, I have to choose a constraint to embrace, the boundaries of the page are an easy starting point.
AM: I have a lot of things I am no where near finished exploring with aesthetically, but also have a myriad of unfinished, generally useful tools for end users.
M: If I need to do the same or similar stuff in different places, I’ll try and make sure my code is parametric enough to accommodate for it, and the API allows it.
ZL: I remember thinking something simple like, “Better tools = better starting point = better work”. That was the motto.
AM: My private policy is: when I get bored and tired of a specific effect (that I’ve found has a sort of “signature”) it’s a candidate for release.
ZL: There are just so many pieces to know about and how they fit together, it seems to me an inherently collaborative medium and one which we should actively work to demystify and to lower the barrier to entry. Good tools do that.

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May 2011, Kyle Mconald interviewed colleagues and friends Zach Lieberman, Anton Marini, Memo and Dan Paluska about “open source, media art, and digital communities”. The Sharing Interviews were conducted using Etherpad and published on GitHub.