The old adage says people are either left-brained or right-brained.
One set is analytical. Logic is the gasoline that runs through their veins, fueling their work and worldview. They’re the mathematicians, the programmers, and the coders. The other set consists of artists. They use their creativity to build a world of emotion. They help us think with our hearts.
For Lee Tusman, this is a false dichotomy. The artist, programmer, and Purchase College educator has firmly planted himself at the intersection of art and technology. Tusman’s work—which includes tech-enabled projects like interactive media, video games, virtual assistants, and sound art—is a testament to the way both art and technologyfoster human connection.
Most of us don’t think of social media as an art form, but a couple of years ago, it wouldn’t be strange to find Tusman tinkering on a Twitter bot and testing the bounds. One of his favorite bots translated Alice in Wonderland to and from the universal language Esperanto. The results were rife with mistranslations, highlighting the way that games of telephone unwind into misunderstandings on the internet.
No matter the medium, Tusman’s art is held together by two common threads.
First is the delicate dance between creativity and logic—taking an idea and then deconstructing it to figure out how it could possibly work. It’s something he admits is the hardest part. “That’s what I try to teach,” he says.
Second is his emphasis on community. Tusman got his start at Brandeis University, where he studied sociology with a focus on art and social change. This expertise was later reflected in his role as creative director for Hidden City Philadelphia. During his stay at the Philadelphia-based nonprofit, he curated a festival that transformed closed and abandoned buildings into art installations and performance spaces. One of the installations/public interventions was set in a sprawling government building left abandoned with calendars still hung on the walls. It served as a de facto city hall for weeks.
“[The festival participants] actually activated [the building] with all kinds of community meetings and their own alternative pseudo-political space,” he says. “I was involved in that kind of approach of socially engaged public art practice.”
Choose Your Own Adventure
While working with Hidden Cities, Tusman also developed an interest in experimental autobiographical video games—the idea that you could tell a story within an interactive context. Think of it as a choose-your-own-adventure, but the adventure is someone’s life.
“My art practice is unique in some ways. There are some people coming from a coding background,” he says. “I've always worked in artist-run communities, and I had a background in socially engaged public art practice. I was looking to be able to make interactive work using my own photography, audio interviews, and drawings.”
He started with no-code game engines, which allow users without programming experience to craft games. Stifled by the limitations, he turned to the Internet and taught himself to code, falling back on the fundamentals he learned while building websites for his undergrad thesis.
“I was kind of learning in small ways and kind of gobbling up information and enjoying it, like puzzle solving,” he says.
But Tusman also knew he’d never grow as a programmer if he continued to study alone. He went back to school, earning an MFA in Design Media Arts from UCLA in 2017.
Collective Computing
Though Tusman has held many creative roles within his community, including his work with the New York City artist-run collective Flux Factory and his Artists and Hackers podcast, he fell into teaching at a college level somewhat accidentally.
In 2014, he ran an artist residency in his hometown of Philadelphia, where he helped curate workshops for national and international artists looking to create art and technology-based projects. After teaching one of the workshops, someone asked him to take on a course at Moore College of Art & Design.
“I tried out teaching a course, and I loved it,” he says. “That's when I was like, ‘Oh, I want to transition, and I want to be a professor.’ I really like doing this. I want to make this my full thing.’”
Everyone is an Artist
Today, Tusman has settled into his role as Assistant Professor of New Media and Computer Science at Purchase College. Last semester, he taught Programming for Visual Artists, an introduction to new media class where artists craft visual art with code; Scripting for the Web, where students learn to make web applications such as experimental weather applications and web radio players; and Special Projects in Tiny Computing, where students design their own technology-based art project around portable Raspberry Pi computers to build cameras, costumes, and speculative computing hardware.
For him, the greatest reward is watching students grow into their own creativity—making art that Tusman, despite his prolific output and numerous accolades, admits he’d never have thought of himself.
“Everyone's creative,” he says. “It doesn't mean you have to be a professional artist, but everyone makes artwork. That's a natural creative drive. We all have these creative drives. It's part of being human.”
