Hi, this is my (almost) May email newsletter. Send me your own newsletters, or respond to this one with what you're up to!

I traveled much in April. I was in Philadelphia, NYC, Berlin and Asheville, NC with talks, workshops and performances. It was great to connect with friends new and old.

I just got back from the Re:Happening event staged at the site of the original Black Mountain College, and put on by the Black Mountain College Museum over the weekend, where I performed with artist Ivana Larrosa. We had a LOT of fun and a great enthusiastic audience. We performed twice on Saturday evening.

Performing Friday 5/1 at the NJ Art Book Fair

This Friday I perform a live score for Sue Huang's project Bodies of Flora, for the opening of the Jersey Art Book Faire at Mana Contemporary. The event runs 4p - 7pm, and the performance starts around 5:30pm.

Told as a ghost story and presented as a live lecture-performance, the work draws on the history of botanical science to bring these forms back as spectral presences. It invites the audience into a collective act of conjuring—restoring presence to what has been lost.

L5 updates

The creative coding library L5 that I initiated continues to grow. Graduate students at University of Washington conducted two Usability Studies. We've been incorporating some of their feedback so far, and work will proceed over the summer to address issues they've identified. Thanks to students in UW's Human Centered Design and Engineering program Julie Lee, Ruiyi Gao, Keye Yu, Sabrina Kang, Kathryn Rambo, Swathi Sridhar, Manish Varrier, Auli Badoni.

I led L5 workshops in creative coding and computational art at CCFest, the Electronic Faire at Temple University and at the Algorithmic Art Assembly, and met a lot of people. I really enjoy that part a lot. I also gave a talk at Algorithmic Art Assembly, and at the Berlin Permacomputing Meet-Up. We had a really productive conversation that has led to some areas of research for further improving L5 that grew out of this.

The L5-Starter "hello world" project in L5 running on the MNT Pocket Reform computer

L5 slide at the State of LibreGraphics conference. This is not me!

Most recently L5 was included at the State of LibreGraphics conference in Nuremberg, Germany. I wasn't on site but hope to join in-person in the future.

Permacomputing NYC

The Permacomputing NYC meetup has really taken off! We've had 60 people show up to the last couple meetings, and we have an email listserve. The next meeting is Tuesday May 12 at 6pm at Ridgewood Commons.

Alex Nathanson will present two new projects that are particularly relevant to permacomputing. First, he'll discuss methods for designing around the unique characteristics of solar power, which is the focus of his upcoming DIY solar art book. He will also talk about his work with community virtual power plants, which are distributed networks of batteries that provide services to the electricity grid and generate value for communities.

What's next

I'm working on 2 small projects lately: one is a bandcamp hosting site alternative. I had used Faircamp for the ExquisiteCorp website and I like its premise but I'd prefer a "finished" piece of software that doesn't need updates, and I'm unable to build the current software from source, thus I'm building my own alternative, just as I previously built (and continue to use for each class that I teach) my own website generator panblog.

Here's the comment lines at the beginning of the Vi-Basic program, running inside Vi-Basic

I've also made my own mini version of the classic Vi/Vim text editor in the BASIC programming language. This grows out of a comment someone made at the Berlin Permacomputing Meetup that we should do a future code jam session this summer where we build an editor for L5 code inside L5 itself. Great idea! Lately I've been interested in the BASIC language so what started as a little experiment and with a couple hours and 250 lines of code I've gotten something surprisingly useful. In fact, the code for the editor can now be edited in itself! Wild. I haven't made it live yet but I hope to make it public and share in the month ahead. I just need to add a search feature and then decide when it's 'feature complete.'

That's it for now. Get in touch to work on music together this summer - I'd love to play more shows, collaborate with dancers/poets/performers/fellow musicians.

Anyone have a room to rent in Berlin in June? I'll be back in July at ZK/U residency but would like to come before then.

In cahoots!

--Lee