Greetings from Berlin, where I'm back for a short residency at ZK/U, the Center for Art and Urbanistics, in the neighborhood of Moabit. Stay to the end, where you'll get a view of Mozart's childhood home.

Preview

This is what it looks like when you visit my studio.

I had a version of this with a hairy arm but it was "too much." Hmmm, still thinking about whether I should do it though...

I'm making a number of smaller projects, sound works, performing and jamming music with other people, and prepping for our open studios and a performance Thursday evening.

Music jam, thanks to Andrey for the invite.

Last month I traveled through central Europe, to Budapest, Prague, Cesky Krumlov, Salzburg, and Vienna, before returning to Berlin. I played in a jam in Vienna at Celeste, and saw over a dozen noise shows, operas, vocal ensembles, electronic sets, and even visited 3 castles and Mozart's childhood home.

I also met up in person for the first time with musicians and programmers in Budapest and Prague that I'd become friendly with online through Mastodon, the alternative decentralized social media that I've been using since summer 2020, and that brings me a lot of joy! It's really cool to make "online friends" and then meet in person. I used to do this through Flickr 20 years ago, and it feels as special today as it did then.

Open Studios and Concert at ZK/U

This Thursday evening July 23 is the Openhaus at ZK/U. I'll have my studio open and showing 2 new works in progress, plus will be performing a set on modular synth at 9pm either outside, weather permitting, or in the Glasshaus building.

Jonah jamming

Back in Berlin I've reconnected with old friends, jammed in studios, and had a visit from my friend Jonah Senzel. We worked on some music on modular synth, which I think we'll be putting up later this month, and also jammed at the Synthesizer museum and did field recordings along the canals here.

Paper and presentation for Computing within Limits

I collaborated with Kit Kuksenok for a paper on Designing L5: A Permacomputing Approach to Creative Coding, which we presented at the Computing within Limits conference in the end of June.

Paper and presentation for Electronic Literature Organization's Conference 2026

I presented Quilt Poems: Encoding Craft Traditions as Generative Poetry. Video at that link. And my paper is part of the Conference Proceedings.

Work on L5

Sam Heckle continues to knock it out of the park, doing excellent work on the L5 infrastructure. They've built an extension for VSCode and VScodium to make it easier to get started coding with L5. If you use VScodium (open source / non-telemtry fork of VSCode) you can search for L5 in the extensions. If you use VSCode, then you'll have to wait for Micro$oft to approve before it goes live, or manually install it. Please send us any bug reports. Source code.

Sam has a great blog about their work on the extension.

Last week I presented a workshop on Creative Coding with L5 at ZK/U, using the extension. It went well and demonstrated how this makes for a better beginner-friendly workflow. Hooray.

Other L5 updates this month:

• Sam is doing a ton of tests to improve L5 infrastructure. Check their blog.
• L5 is now on Mastodon (currently temporarily down as of the time of publishing this email).
• The push() and pull() functions now correctly contain styles.
• I discovered a minor bug when drawing to an offscreen canvas and applying that to the main window that it didn't maintain the fill() and tint() correctly, now fixed.
• Offline Documentation links for downloading the reference/website were temporarily missing. Those were added back.
• The walkthrough Mac installation tutorial with youtube video has a custom video embedding implementation I wrote that minimizes page loading size until the video is clicked, and an alternative for non-JS browsers.

END

This is what it looks like in the exhibits at Mozart's childhood home in Salzburg. Since he predates modern photography, the exhibits consist of paintings showing him at various stages of life and society then, accompanied by handwritten or typewritten text. I loved it. It reminded me of the Museum of Jurassic Technology! :)

Check out my daily studio notes log.

That's the news. Send me your blogs, artwork, essays, books, zines, etc.

Mit herzlichen Grüßen,

Lee