This is a page for ongoing tiny updates on my projects and research, including technical notes, code, and screenshots of work in progress. You can subscribe to the RSS feed.

2026-08-25

Is there anything more satisfying than this implementation of an inkspot algorithm? I read about this algorithm in julie’s blogipode and even picked up the book where she learned about it, which turns out to be written with all example code in FORTH! Anyway, I read the concept, then thought, how hard could it be to implement in L5?

The rule is: A blank pixel is dead. A colored pixel is alive. If any spot on the grid has exactly 3 neighbors alive, or if the spot currently is alive, then that spot becomes or stays alive the next frame that the grid is drawn. Thus the name inskpot, since it floods/spills out. So basically I created a 2-dimensional table in Lua to hold each pixel’s state as alive or dead. Then I created a second grid the same size and just cycle through.

In an hour or two I was good to go with my first implementation. I’ve tried different speeds, algorithm variations and the like. I’m excited to teach this in my Drawing, Moving and Seeing with Code course in a couple weeks.

Speaking of which: today was the first day of class for the semester, and I taught all afternoon. I think it went well. We did programming in Apple LOGO (class notes) and then in a web-based JS LOGO IDE.

During class students spent time implementing a flag, based on this Turtle Bunting Vexillological Reader I’ve collected in Dig Archive.

I hadn’t coded in LOGO in a while so it took me some time to get back into the swing of things implementing functions with arguments and the like. I really enjoy the tooling of the JS LOGO IDE. I feel like its ideas should spread to other code editors, maybe even one I build someday.

An algorithmic ‘flower’ drawn with Apple LOGO

Apple LOGO has its pleasures but I couldn’t figure out how to overwrite a previous iteration of a function if I made a syntax error! And the lack of much editor tooling makes it a bit clunky to work in. But it was fun making work in it and sharing the experience with students, who seemed to get a lot out of it. It was a good reintro to just working with code in a low stakes kind of way to help us get started after the summer break.

I should also mention I created my own implementation of basic Turtle Graphics in a LOGO-like lang implemented...

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This has only increased during my lifetime, and I regularly find myself as I get older learning to appreciate well-made and home made items, particularly things that wear better with age.

As interpreted by others, the whole mindset of “beausage” is that things gain beauty when they are used, and used regularly. –That Thing Called Beausage

This also goes for items that can be repaired. In an era of planned obsolescence, much of the technology we use is extremely brittle, with a short intended lifespan.

In contrast, as I’ve increased my own technological skills I’ve gained some knowledge and ability to figure out how to repair some items. I’ve also benefited from knowledge gained online, from tutorials (shout out to the old Instructables and to a million people’s blogs!) to in-person workshops, makerspaces, and friends’ studios.

That said, here’s a few recent repairs from the past month:

‘Fixing’ the too-long headphone cable on the Sony MDR-7506

I LOVE this headphone. Absolutely love it. In college one of my study tracks was electroacoustic music production, and we had a pair of Grado SR-80 headphones, and I purchased my own that I used for many years, and even had them repaired by the company at their original headquarters in Brooklyn. But these are home studio headphones, not intended for public listening due to their open back design that bleeds audio, so many years ago I tried a friend’s Sony MD-7506s, which I loved and then purchased my own.

Every film or theater production tech has used these headphones. If you see people shooting a film, recording a documentary, or working backstage in a theater there’s a pretty good chance they’ll be wearing these, and for good reason. They’re built well, sound quality is good, and they’re comfortable.

But the cable is a mile long. Seriously, it almost reaches to my ankles, and I’m tall! I don’t want it getting snagged by a passing subway train. I’ve always thought about cutting off the long coil cable and soldering on a straight cable, but I couldn’t be bothered.

Finally I thought about revisiting this option and looked for a little tutorial online or documentation of other people that have tried this. But in my search I stumbled across this incredible no-soldering solution by Michael Wynne. It’s simple to do, takes only a couple minutes, and it has indeed shortened the cable to a more manageable amount.

Fixing the latch on my eurorack synthesizer case

I’ve had the Intellijel 7u Eurorack case for about six years now. It does the job, and I appreciate that Intellijel developed the 1u row for utility tool modules. But I’ve also always found the case a bit overpriced for...

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This summer I participated in my second artist-in-residency at the Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik / Center for Art and Urbanistics, affectionately called ZK/U, in the Moabit neighborhood of Berlin, Germany. I’m writing this up as self-reflection but also because I think it helps to show what I’m working on, my community / “scene”, and I enjoy reading these kinds of reflections and write-ups by other media artists, such as blogposts by Antonio Roberts on conferences, residencies and exhibits.

Last year I spent 4 months in residency at ZK/U as well, during my fall 2026 sabbatical, so I was already familiar with its staff and community. In the fall I worked primarily on the L5 creative coding library, which I’m now using to make the majority of my work, and other people are contributing to and using to make interactive art on the computer. In this post I’ll concentrate on my residency this summer.

ZK/U is a special place, basically an alternative artist/cultural space, a non-commercial space specifically. They describe themselves as “production site, artist/research-residency, program platform. In our work we connect local practice and global discourse.” There is live/work studios for about 14 international artists, along with a connected building with concert/venue, bar, meeting rooms, and a rooftop space. It is surrounded by a public park with gardens, playground, meeting space, and a DIY tiny home. There are also a large number of public events, from documentary film screenings to concerts to community fleamarkets and bike swapmeets.

The residency building is an old railroad freight station. The rooms are large. There is a generous back deck. Artists aren’t specifically working on any one thing per se, but everyone seems to be aligned with the idea of city as site, and there are various strains of a focus on community, activism or socially-engaged practices that seems to underlie many of the participating artists.

Every other month there are public open studios, which is the main public program for presenting the work of the artists in residence there. This is an open format, less daunting than an exhibit as it frames the work shown as “work-in-progress”, a good way to show the work of artists, how they work, and allow experiments to happen.

In this particular residency period I had two goals: to work on experimental sound art and performance, as well as to make several new media artworks to present publicly.

Performance and sound art

In terms of music, I brought my eurorack modular synthesizer, as well as a relatively new to me, and new invention to the world, a woodwind instrument called the Alto Venova, made by Yamaha. It’s a bit like a cross between a sax/clarinet and a recorder. It is made of ABS plastic, and uses an alto saxophone mouthpiece. I used...

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This is an off the cuff review of Minutiae, which is a minimalist photo app of sorts, described as an anti-social media app, a place to save small moments from life, once a day, over a four year timespan. I spontaneously started writing it a couple minutes after one of the impromptu prompts popped up and I took a photo of my camping gear laid out and felt some calm in the chaos.

I initially signed up when it was first out, I think in 2017, though I’m not sure 100%. The premise of the app as I understand it is to record your ‘mundane’ daily moments, unfiltered, as a kind memento of life as it is lived. The way it works is that once a day at a apparently random moment, all over the world, everyone using Minutiae gets an alert to open their app and take a photo of their immediate environment. Technically, if you pay for a subscription ($20 annually), you have up to 5 minutes (I believe?) to respond to the alert. Once the app is opened you have 5 seconds to aim the camera before it takes a photo.

This is the moment I find just some slight nervousness, like, what do i want to save into my digital time capsule? Because I know it will become a part of my personal record, and it will get shared with others too! More on that in a moment. I usually quickly look for something to shoot, almost always aim it away from me and at something interesting in my environment, but often I am at home, or on the subway, on my couch, or in a meeting with friends, or even teaching (i think that happened once).

Once the photo is snapped, it uploads via data or wifi, or with neither, it temporarily saves to the app, and you can swipe left or right to see your own previous photos. Or click a box underneath and it pulls up a random stranger’s photo from somewhere else in the world showing what they just photographed in front of them. Then you have 60 seconds (I believe) to swipe through and look at that stranger’s previous photos and/or your own previous photos.

After 60 seconds the app hides the photo you’ve taken, your past photos, and the stranger you were paired with’s photos. You’ll be able to see your own past photos again the next time you shoot something with the app, at least as much as you can swipe through in 60 seconds, but you will probably never see the stranger’s photos again.

When I signed up the first time I was a grad student at UCLA studying design media arts. I had met the founders of the app through School for Poetic Computation several years earlier, in New York. I was somewhat interested in the idea, but honestly wasn’t sure how motivated...

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In today’s case, like most things I apply to, the rejection email did not provide any feedback guidance so I am speculating without having a ton of data. As part of the application process I had met with the org director, so I have at least some knowledge that I was a good fit, and based on some research, I believe the issue was the classic one I’ve dealt with a number of times: is my artwork contextualized as fine art like sculpture, painting, poetry? Or is it not?

To be clear, there were likely dozens of applications for this fellowship and far less accepted. I could have had a weaker application, or not fit their needs. Or many other reasons. And since they provide no feedback on the app I do not know why I was rejected. I also think it’s normal and okay to go through this process. I shouldn’t be accepted to a fellowship just because I think I was a good applicant! That’s for them to decide. But based on a hunch I am wondering this time if it’s because I present as a “media artist” with currently many game arts projects that are experimental narrative works but to someone that hasn’t thought much about games as medium, it might look like any old generic video game to them. Or else too out-of-the-box, too not traditionally art for them. And when that feeling happens - it’s common! - I start to ruminate. Thus this blog post.

Let’s start with self-identification as an artist. I’m trying to write about the phenomenon that most of us working with a computer to make our art are seen as outside of traditional fine arts media. I’m encompassing those working on the computer primarily to make their art who may identify as “media artists”, “new media artist”, working in “game arts”, “digital art”, “computational art” and many other related terms. Or we’re just “artists.” My bio on my website says “artist” for example. And this is absolutely not a new issue, and not even necessarily different from similar boundaries thrown up between fine art versus craft for example, or anywhere folks patrol the edges of discipline.

Straight up, for artists working in digital media, some see our work as outside of the bounds of art shown in mainstream arts settings. This isn’t confined to the domain of residency/fellowship/grants but of course at all levels. I have a MFA from a “Design Media Arts” graduate program at UCLA, which is housed within its art school but considered separate from its Arts MFA, with different professors and cohort of students artificially kept apart even...

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This is a post about my new text editing program yvi.

I like reinventing wheels. At least I do when it comes to making things like art , craft, food, or code. It’s how I learn. And it’s how I can shape tools or work to fit my own mind. I think because my background is in art, and because I didn’t formally learn Computer Science, despite the fact that I teach it, my software has a bit of a handmade feel to it.

As a case in point, I’ve built my own static website creator panblog when I grew frustrated with other more well-known alternatives that were clunky, poorly documented, or bloated pieces of software.

I’m also drawn to programming languages and paradigms that are a bit out of step with the mainstream and especially silicon valley’s current conception of software. For example, I love glue languages, languages and libraries for learners, and am a fan of scripting languages. My favorites are Lua, Bash, Fish, Forth-likes and BASIC.

Last year I spent a couple months researching and writing BASIC, specifically the Yabasic dialect, which is about a quarter century old and continously maintained. While I’ve been recommended by online friends to try out some other variants, I’ve found it easy to use and well-documented. It’s not the greatest for building graphical user interfaces, at least in my experience, but I use L5, or Processing-p5 libraries for that.

For a modern BASIC, it’s quite fun to use. I made my own cyber-hoss racing game , a command line game inspired by the UFO50 and Flash game Quibble Race. I also tinkered with the internals of the text version of The Oregon Trail, and built a clone, a simple version of Dope Wars economic simulation game.

Recently I came across The People’s Permacomputer, a project by Vidak, which led me to the online home for a great active BASIC Programming forum and various linked projects to build a 1970s style computer from scratch. I’ve been using Neovim (and before that, Vim) for years and years. I’ve never made a text editor before. But I decided it could be fun to try to implement my own. Vi seemed like a tall order to implement, but I’ve been using Offpunk, a small simple (arguable what this means) TUI client for browsing the internet including the world wide web and Gemini protocol. It has just a few implemented shortcuts like h/j/kl and g and G and others for moving around. So inspired by this, I thought I could likely build an ULTRA simple editor with a mininum of Vim commands. How hard could it be?

Well, it wasn’t too hard! With Yabasic in a hundred lines of code or so I quickly implemented the basic layout of a minimal blank page and added in those simple Vi commands for moving around and switching between insert and normal modes. I added the ability to open a file...

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L5 is a creative coding library in the family of Processing/p5, aimed at artists and learners, and responding to principles of permacomputing. L5 is in alpha, and was initially released in December 2025. It is implemented in Lua and uses the LÖVE framework under the hood. It is free and open source and is developed by a growing community of contributors.

This is a roundup blog post on recent work in spring 2026 relating to L5, its contributors, community, and maintenance.

We recognize all contributors to our open-source project, including code, documentation, issues and any other way that contributes to the library and its community.

15 people have pushed code to L5 or its documentation site. An additional several dozen people have emailed, discussed or otherwise sent in suggestions, feedback and improvement ideas for the library and its community. Thank you to everyone that has contributed to or uses L5.

Usability Studies

Thanks to two teams of graduate students from University of Washington’s department of Human Centered Design and Engineering. Julie Lee, Ruiyi Gao, Keye Yu, Sabrina Kang conducted usability studies for beginners to L5 and creative coding. Kathryn Rambo, Swathi Sridhar, Manish Varrier, Auli Badoni conducted usability studies on those with previous creative coding experience in p5.js or similar. Their findings were published as two different reports, which are posted in this L5 discourse thread. We’ve already begun to address their findings, and will be spending the summer implementing as many of their suggestions as we can. A huge thank you to these teams of students for their helpful research into L5. This has been a seriously helpful experience working with them.

Workshops, Presentations and Discussions

L5 was included in the State of LibreGraphics conference in Nuremberg, Germany in April.

There were introductory and creative computation workshops in L5 at the Algorithmic Art Assembly festival at Gray Area in San Francisco, at the Electronic Faire at Temple University’s Charles Library makerspace in Philadelphia, and online as part of CCFest.

I gave talks on L5 at Algorithmic Art Assembly, WordHack in Brooklyn, the Permacomputing NYC meetup, and at the Berlin Permacomputing Meet-Up.

Thanks to everyone that attended these workshops and talks, and for your feedback and discussion. These have led to ideas and improvements implemented and under consideration for L5 and its ecosystem.

Library Upates

L5 is in alpha and not at feature parity with Processing and p5.js completely. While we won’t be matching every one of their features - for example, it does not make sense to add p5’s DOM/browser functions - there is room for improvement to the library. Currently, L5 has about 200 functions implemented.

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Later this year I’d like to put out a zine about No-Input Mixing Board Music. But I thought I could start with an introductory blog post! So here we are.

In the fall I was an artist-in-resident at ZK/U in Berlin - a really special artist-in-residency, where I live/worked with a dozen other artists from around the world. I worked on L5, a creative coding library in Lua, and created half a dozen artworks and installation using the coding library. In addition, I brought my modular synth with me and played some shows and jams around the city, and performed at Z/KU. Not long after I began the residency I visited the depths of the ‘gear closet’ and found an old Mackie mixer sitting around. A light went off in my head and I remembered: hey, this could work for no-input mixing board music. And I brought the mixer out of the basement and into my studio to work with it.

In some ways, writing about no-input mixing board feels like a ‘throwback’ because it became popular among experimental sound musicians about 20 or 15 years ago. And yet, this is a niche group, and I think the full depths of the instrument haven’t been fully explored. And at a time that so much gear and music subculture has been containerized and gear gets productized it feels like a ripe time for re-exploration of techniques and systems that work against products, planned obsolescence and proprietary usage. I am particularly on this wavelength recently as I think about permacomputing. More on that later.

What is the No-input mixing board instrument?

I don’t know if this will make sense to anyone else, but I think of the no-input mixing board as falling roughly between a synthesizer, a radio, a violin and a bank of buttons on an elevator.

The name “no-input” is misleading: there is input. Typically no-input mixing involves plugging an output from an analog mixing desk back into the mixer’s input so that the circuit forms a loop: an oscillator. Feedback transforms the controls on the mixer so that they modulate the sound output, which is what turns the mixer into a playable instrument. Audio feedback develops through this loop, with a large variety of sound textures possible as you continue to add more output to input routing on the mixer. The faders and knobs on the mixer allow for immediate playback manipulation - massively changing the sound.

The No-Input Mixing Board has been called the “poor man’s synthesizer,” but unfortunately I can’t remember where I heard that. You don’t need to...

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Written 2021-08-12

Starting when I began undergrad college and continuing for 15 years I worked in small non-profit arts organizations: these were small art museums or art and performance-presenting organizations. After graduating from undergrad I joined a new residency program with individual studios and shared gallery. I was living at home so the studio and gallery gave me independence and gave me a meeting space and community. A few years later I began working with artist collectives. These were generally groups of 5 - 10 people that collectively had studios and a gallery space, or maybe just the gallery space. The kinds of collectives I’ve been part of:

1. Let’s call this one LB (update 2026: this is Little Berlin), an artist-run space (about 5 - 10 floating organizers) with monthly exhibits, weekly parties/raves, performance art events, community garden, BBQs, zine library and more (in Philadelphia). I first learned about it when I was on a first or second date with someone and she took me there. I met the organizers, who said they really needed help, and I was game. Soon it came to take over a large part of my life. While running a ‘professional’ non-profit I put an equal amount of time into organizing the space. But sadly, the space is now closed under the pandemic, and I haven’t been part of it for many years since I left that city. Lately I’ve been in touch with past members and we’ve been talking about how to ‘archive’ and preserve the activities, zines and documentation of exhibits. Not technically a legal entity. We did have a shared bank account, kind of like if we were a local baseball team or club. We lived in an area where we as DIY and grassroots artists contributed to a process of gentrification, and soon found ourselves surrounded by new construction, families moving in who couldn’t tolerate our late night events, and conflicts with new property developers and the warehouse owner we were located within. The organizers (we called ourselves ‘members’ or ‘curators’) were all close, lived within a...

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   Computational poetry showing stripes and text responding to ICE raids, code in L5 (animation has been shortened, excerpted, color reduced and compressed)

   I’m not sure if I’ll do a post every month on L5, the creative coding library I initiated summer/fall 2025 and that is now out in an alpha version, but there’s enough activity happening that it seems like a good idea to capture work and ideas down somewhere to track progress.

   Since I last wrote about the first L5 contributors meeting we’ve now held a second meeting, though this one was rolled into the first Permacomputing NYC meetup, with one part of it being about L5. We had 20 people show up, discussed permacomputing, which was a spirited conversation, and then had a presentation on Lichen-Markdown by Max Fowler, followed by my own presentation on L5. Also I want to note that L5 now has a page on the Permacomputing Wiki.

   Since last month’s meetup, L5 now has:

   • Step by step install guides for Mac, Windows and Linux
   • a new printToScreen() function
   • updated Getting Started instructions for your first steps after installing L5 and Love2d
   • new Contributing to L5 guide (thanks to Jessica Garson for contributing this!)
   • updated L5 Starter project that is more beginner-friendly (thanks to the entire group that contributed ideas to this at the last contributors meetup)
   • there were also a few contributed pull requests to the L5 website that fixed typos, added links, corrected code examples

   This is so exciting, that L5 is starting to grow a community around it!

   In the coming month or two there are a few events where I’ll be presenting L5. There is going to be an L5 workshop at the next CCFest 2026 on March 21, a talk I’ll give on L5 for the next Wordhack at Brooklyn’s own Wonderville on February 19, and an in-person workshop with L5 at the Algorithmic Art Assembly at Grey Area in San Francisco on March 26.

   New feature: printToScreen()

   
   L5 code in the Neovim editor on left and the running code sketch in the center showing drawing lines based on mouse position and an onscreen print output that scrolls. Animation is an excerpt of running program, with compressed colors and reduced graphical fidelity/detail

   As mentioned, L5 now ships with a new function printToScreen(). Simply add that function to your code somewhere, like in setup(), and then print() output will display onscreen. This allows...

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