I like to send these email newsletters out monthly near the end of the month but I got distracted at the end of May and now it's mid-June and it's my birthday! Get in touch if you're reading this saturday and want to come to a picnic in Prospect Park Brooklyn!

You can always read my log to find out what I'm working on daily.

Travel

For the next 3 weeks I'll be traveling: to Budapest, then Prague, then Vienna, then Berlin. Get in touch to meet up, or connect me to friends. I'm bringing my modular synth and my new and hilariously-marketed Alto Venova woodwind instrument, which I play through my modular synth.

L5 creative coding library updates, GSoC, and Itch

Slime mold code sketch, created in L5 at the workshop at ITP Camp

I'm partnering with Processing Foundation this summer and am lucky to have Sam Heckle as our funded Google Summer of Code Contributor. Welcome Sam! Sam is documenting their work on a blog here. They are in-process improving our L5 website, documentation, doing user testing, and building out tools including beginner-friendly tooling to get started building with L5. Last week we led a workshop at NYU's ITP Camp, where I taught in 2015 before beginning my MFA.

Lee and Sam leading a workshop at NYU's ITP Camp last week

We've also launched a L5 page on Itch, as another place for folks to learn about L5, particularly as Itch is such an incredible online space for experimental games, tools and art. Its founder has built the site with Lua (our underlying language) and got his start making games with Love2d (our underlying framework). There is now a new L5 blog on Itch, and yes, it does have a RSS feed.

One thing I love about Itch: It hosts game jams but also many other creative jams. This month I made 2 jam projects.

New jam projects

'not a pipe' presents n0iseband: a new approach to noise improvisation

screenshot of a strange instrument generated in n0iseband

YOUTUBE VIDEO PREVIEW

I created a noise music tool this week for Noise Jam 3, and it works on Mac, Windows and Linux. It's called 'not a pipe' presents n0iseband: a new approach to noise improvisation. Start it up, a random noise song starts, then use the keyboard as your instrument to solo with many skronky sounds. Advance the song to get a new backing track and new sounds to play. It's inspired by Jamey Aebersold, Band in a Box, Rock Band, Merzbow, Tarantula Hill.... Incidentally, it includes audio from the Free Music Archive, which I love, but have you ever noticed so much of the music seems to come from the golden age of Creative Commons utopian dreaming, back in 2008 - 2011? No? Anyway, there are tracks from Masami Akita, Nautical Almanac, Lucky Dragons, To Live and Shave in LA, Mouthus, Chuck Bettis, many more.

REFERENCE 1: When I was a kid you could buy these cassette tapes, and later they were CDs (maybe before that they were records?), that accompanied these music workbooks by the musician Jamey Aebersold. Basically, a backing band would play and you were supposed to learn jazz improvisation by playing over the backing track. Do they still have these kinds of things? This is the noise music equivalent. All backing tracks sourced from Free Music Archive (a cornucopia of beautiful music).

REFERENCE 2: I never played ROCK BAND on the Nintendo Wii but i get the idea, i just didn't like the music. Now I've fixed it.

Let me know if you try it and like it or have any feedback. I will continue to work on it if there is interest. It's made in L5!

Speed Project: The Gluesticks and Gluecode Manifesto

I participated in a rapid fire session for the Manifesto Jam 2026 and made an afternoon project in L5 called The Gluesticks and Gluecode Manifesto, which you can experience as an application for Mac, Windows, Linux, a youtube video recording, a text file, or the source code. I won't reveal more here. You'll have to check it out.

YOUTUBE VIDEO PREVIEW

Tiny code editor: yvi

Because I have no end of "shower thoughts", one day I decided to build my own minimal code editor. I wanted to try making minimal software, that uses less resources, and an 'older way of doing things', and because I thought it would be fun, I built a simple clone of the famous Vi text editor out of BASIC. I wrote a blog post about it, and then it blew up on Hacker News and was written about in The Register. I was not expecting that! I've tested it on Linux and Mac. It does have a few bugs! :)

The yvi code editor running in a 'modern' terminal

Permacomputing NYC

We've had great presentations in the last few months, as well as discussions. We're taking a break for the next 2 months as I'll be away. You can sign up for the low-volume email discussion list, which is also a great way to find out about other cool things happening in New York. Not to mention, check out the community calendar Red Calendar, presented at one of our early permacomputing meetups.

Articles and Conferences

I have been collaborating with the incredible Engineering Manager and p5.js Project Lead Kit Kuksenok on some scholarship. Our paper Processing/p5 Defined through Practice and Learning will soon be published through IEEE Computer Magazine Special Issue on Software Engineering in Generative Art. We also are presenting and have a paper in the upcoming online conference 12th Workshop on Computing Within Limits . It is free and held on Zoom on June 23 - 25. Our paper Designing L5: A Permacomputing Approach to Creative Coding will be published as part of the proceedings, and we'll also have online discussion as well.

Recent performances

Performances with Ivana Larrosa for the Black Mountain College Re:Happening went well! I really enjoyed my time there. It was great to reconnect with the museum director Jeff, and to spend time with our hosts and see the original site of Black Mountain College. Thanks to Ivana for setting this up.

And I had such a lovely time performing with artist Sue Huang for the opening of the Jersey Art Book Fair last month on her Bodies of Flora project. It was such a smooth collaborative process. We've been friends for years but had never collaborated before. We'd like to perform this again!

I'm overdue to rehaul my music website and put up old and new recordings. I hope to do that in July when I'm in residency at ZK/U, along with playing some more gigs.

Goodbye

See you next month? Respond to this email and let me know what you're working on. Add me to your email list. Pet a cat. Hug a friend.

If you can't get enough of me, follow the log.

Cheers, Lee