Nosebook 👃🏿📓

Log

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Log

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.

2026-04-01

![computational art made in L5]({{“/images/log/100yrs.webp”

absolute_url}} “Computational art made for the Computational Poetry for 100 Years workshop”)

Last week I traveled to San Francisco to speak at the Algorithmic Art Assembly at Grey Area. I presented a workshop Computational Poetry for 100 Years on Thursday, then gave a talk about L5 on Friday afternoon. It was a fun conference on algorithmic art, musicians and toolbuilders. I love a conference combining workshops, talks and evening performances. I connected with new and old friends and collaborators. I also made some L5 stickers, which I handed out. There’s an algorithmic logo sticker and a graff/drawing sticker too.

![stickers, including L5]({{“/images/log/l5-sticker.webp”

absolute_url}} “Stickers including L5”)

Some other folks have been using L5 in their own practice. For example, durian has made Dicey Passwords, using L5 and Fennel.

All of the GSoC proposals have now come in. The idea is to have someone work with me remotely this summer to implement improvements and add functionality to L5.

2026-03-17

![Haiku OS desktop on my macbook air]({{“/images/log/haiku.webp”

absolute_url}} “Haiku OS on my Macbook Air”)

I downloaded and ran a test of the Haiku operating system on an old intel macbook air. I went through the Tour through WebPositive, its built in browser. Unfortunately the Mac’s broadcom doesn’t have drivers on Haiku currently, so I ordered a small USB Wifi dongle that I read should work. I made a test website on the machine, but as there’s no internet on the device yet I only ran it locally. I’m looking forward to getting this set up and running L5 on it and doing more ‘creative coding’ on it! Seems like a cool path to try this system out, and it works well on older machines, but it’s definitely a niche.

In response to some questions asked on Discourse about L5 for GSOC proposals I wrote up some notes on how we might structure new L5sound and L5video libraries.

2026-03-16

Many new examples added to the L5 website, thanks to work started by hmyam6090-lab, who also contributed our custom 404 page last week. I also worked with Kit on our paper. In the evening, NTS DJ Graham Dunning played from my latest album ZK/U 1 that I recorded with Ella and Siiri (as ExquisiteCorp, kuunsirpale and Ella Prokkola) at ZK/U in the fall. I’m on no-input mixing board, vocals and microcassette. Siiri played clarinet and did vocals. And Ella did vocals. The show was DJed on NTS Radio, called Fractal Meat on a Spongy Bone.

2026-03-15

Six of my themes for pyradio were added to the latest release. I contributed an updated package to...

No-input is my instrument: An intro to Making Music with a No-input Mixing Board

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You can listen to this album mix to accompany reading this post. ZK/U 1 by ExquisiteCorp, kuunsirpale and Ella Prokkola recorded live at ZK/U art residency, Berlin, DE 22 October 2025.

ZK/U 1 by ExquisiteCorp, kuunsirpale and Ella Prokkola

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...

Being part of an art collective

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I originally wrote this short post in August 2021 for another online space but am RE-PLANTING it here. I realized that lots of people have never worked in this mode of collectivity, and I thought it would be good to capture down some of what makes them work and how they function. This isn’t a prescriptive post about HOW to organize as an artist collective but just a simple description of how four of the collectives I’ve been part of organize themselves. Originally I did not write the names of the communities, but now in spring 2026 I am just naming them. While re-planting this post here I got the idea that I should write up a follow-up post on the HOWs of artist-run collectives and spaces: how do we organize? why do we organize? how are conflicts resolved? how do decisions get made? etc. Look for a follow-up post hopefully soon.

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:

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...
Read more...

What's cooking with L5? New events, documentation and printToScreen - February 2026

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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...

Command Line Incantations for audiovisual magick

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Manipulated duotone image of Interworld Media performing at Algorithmic Pattern Salon - Photo edited with didder (dithering, duotone) and imagemagick (file conversion).

These are command line shell snippets for useful utilities, sometimes referred to as incantantions. In a way, they are a kind of magic spell. These incantations transform text, images, audio and video.

If you’re not a command line user and not interested in learning it (also an okay choice!), I can recommend the free and open source GUI tool Krita for digital drawing and image manipulation. I actually prefer it to Photoshop. And for audio manipulation I recommend Audacity for basic editing and recording.

I’ve written previously on Why I use the command line, and Command line alternatives to cloud products and platforms. By far the simplest explanation of why you might use this instead of individually opening up a GUI like Krita is because the command line is a lot faster, rarely changes, and can be automated for converting an entire folder of images. For an intro to using the command line, there are many introductions online, or check out my decade+ old workshop notes for Intro to the Command Line.

Getting started with the command line does feel magical as you start to learn just how easy and fast it can be. But it takes time building up your spellbook. This page aims to be a place to find many of these starter scripts, especially for working with graphics and audio. Adapt and improve them to your needs.

This is a living page. More snippets may be added over time.

The workhorse programs we are using in the command line here are:

pandoc for converting text between various formats, such as text to a website, ebook or pdf
imagemagick for manipulating images, such as resizing, converting to black and white, removing the background, etc
sox for converting, playing back and editing audio files
ffmpeg to record, convert and stream audio and video

Optional but also useful:

ghostscript for PDF creation
weasyprint for converting websites to PDF
tesseract-ocr for scanning images and converting to plaintext output
aspell, a spell checker I use to autocorrect spelling errors
didder, for making dithered images

Many of these programs I use in one-liner command line incantations. To convert a whole folder of files it is sometimes helpful to use them in a script.

File conversions - Video

Convert between video file formats.

This ffmpeg incantation converts between formats without re-encoding.

ffmpeg -i input.avi -c:v copy -c:a copy output.mp4

Trim out a section of a video file

With ffmpeg you can specify the start time and total length of time to record. In the snippet below we’ve specified 1 minute in (00:01:00) to...

Notes from the first L5 Contributors Meetup

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today we held a small L5 Contributors Meetup in Brooklyn, New York.

L5 is a Lua-based creative coding library from the family of Processing-p5 languages and is out in early alpha now about a month.

I posted on my own instagram last Thursday that I was looking for some help this week testing L5 on various computers, including old Mac and PCs, and almost a dozen people responded that they wanted to meet up. I was blown away, and realized that my apartment wouldn’t accomodate that, nor would a backup conference room I had quickly booked at the library. I kept looking for another space we could move to based on our size and thankfully a friend from CuteLab offered to host us. That was a good fit because it’s an electronic instrument/hardware hacker-type space where folks were engaged in writing software and building hardware instruments.

I hadn’t intended this to necessarily be the first Contributors Meetup but as we were going to have a pretty good size quorum of folks together, I put together an agenda for things to work on.

Agenda

Introductions
Intro to L5
Permacomputing
Breakout groups: try installing L5 and improve or create better documentation
- Website and L5 repo and L5 website repo
- Writing in Markdown
- Working with “issues” on GitHub
Test L5 for feature parity, test shaders, report bugs, fix bugs
What else? and What next?

We met for 3 hours and there were 10 folks joining. I knew roughly half of the people. Most everyone did some form of creative computing but people came from varied backgrounds such as professors teaching with Processing and p5, past students, someone specialized in working with old hardware, live coders, and a friend that professionally writes documentation.

After introducing myself and the L5 library it turned out that about half of the group was already familiar with permacomputing. That was more than I had expected. We had a great conversation about the motivation for a creative coding library for older and lower-powered machines, about consumption and computers, and spoke about our own experiences in the field.

The next steps were to break out and work on installing L5, with an eye to testing the installation documentation and seeing where it could be improved. Within the group we had people testing on Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS (via Love2d-Studio) and Android. As predicted, the Mac and PC install instructions needed some work. Some bugs were reported, screenshots made. Some people made pull requests of the documentation.

This will seem obvious as I say it, but it’s so nice to have people in a room together,...

L5: a New Creative Coding Library in Lua, in the family of Processing/p5 Languages

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

L5, my creative coding library in the family of Processing-like languages has been out in early alpha for a couple weeks now. I haven’t even announced it here yet, so this post is where I’ll do so, as well as put some (very) early feedback notes.

I began the codebase for L5 in July 2025. I have been programming art with code starting with Processing around 2012. I enjoyed that so much and got deeper and deeper into it, even as I found I wasn’t so drawn to the language it’s implemented in, Java, which I grew to dislike even as my skills in programming grew. I just didn’t appreciate things like static typing or access levels.

When p5.js was announced, I was pretty excited. I had been periodically using Processing.js, a discontinued port of Processing to JavaScript, to share my work on the web, whose syntax mostly allowed writing Processing code with a couple modifications. With p5.js, not only was this a native implementation, but I found I preferred the JavaScript language a lot more to Java. I found it easier to understand as a relative beginner to programming, and I just plain liked that it was so fault-tolerant as a scripting language for a browser that prioritized that, versus a more rigorous compiled language.

I basically mostly jumped ship to p5.js for about a decade, working with it as the main tool I make art with. I continued to teach Processing and p5.js in my classes. I created hundreds, maybe a thousand works for web and even exhibitions in p5.js over a decade. p5.js got me into JavaScript, where I learned much of its large ecosystem, both its pros and cons. Especially as “coming out of the pandemic” I was starting to create more works to be presented in gallery and irl exhibition spaces, I was feeling the limitations of JavaScript.

To name several of these negatives: JavaScript as a language, and particularly the community of frameworks and development changes at lightning speed. From year to year favored environments, paradigms, code editors, packages rise and fall, grow in popularity, and most alarmingly, their APIs change. While p5.js doesn’t have this problem as much, as it’s hooked into browsers which do, I experienced a few of these changes, such as the requirement for a user event to trigger audio (which wiped out the full functioning of a bunch of my older deployed works), as just one example. As I began using p5.js along with other JavaScript frameworks (web audio, opencv, voice detection, and others), things would break, not due to p5.js so much but due to JavaScript.

And the browser environment began to be a hindrance at times. I tried going back to Processing, using it for several projects (an experimental film made with it, for example). At one point, as I struggled to get the video camera library to work with some of my students’ computers, due to Apple restrictions and changes, at some point I...

Some Permacomputing links 🌱💽

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A monitor displaying a digital acquarium framed by a plant and flower bouqet, along with knitting needles and yarn, microcassette recorder and an Ursula K Leguin booklet titled The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. This image is Creative Commons By attribution, Lee Tusman.

This is a starting collection of links on the concept of permacomputing to accompany a talk for Berlin University of the Arts (UdK Berlin) in Generative Arts, November 2025.

In the talk, I spoke about my background in the arts, both at institutions and at DIY spaces. I also spoke about our role as artists working in digital spaces, in computational arts, new media, media arts, or however we define our practice. I’m interested in ways to reduce our impact on the environment. I’m also looking for ways to preserve our work, particularly due to the brittleness of digital media. Finally, I have a goal for community-owned spaces and infrastructure outside of corporate platforms. These interests have come together for me within this (at times speculative) realm.

Students brought up lots of their own ideas and experiences. We also talked about what it means to ground oneself in community, physically - I am part of the Flux Factory arts community - but also digitally in online space(s), and where these may overlap, converge or diverge.

Some of the discussion topics included: preservation, the language itself I am currently developing (L5), emulation, bootlegs, roms and fantasy consoles/workstations, music hardware, and building and using open source tools rather than commercial products. There was interest in the opportunities of creativity for permacomputing-based constraints prompted by Mansoux, Howell, Barok and Heikkilä’s paper on Permacomputing Aesthetics.

This is the starting list of resources I provided:

Permacomputing paper

from ➘Dig Archive

I’m very interested in how the term’s meaning will develop now that people are adopting it. The term resonates with a lot of people, it captures something that is very much wished for, a counternarrative to the rapid “upgradeordie” cycle promoted by the tech industry. It is also somewhat paradoxical, linking an environmentally lightweight practice such as permaculture with one that is as resourceintensive as computing, which doesn’t only weigh heavy on the planet due to energy consumption, but also through unethical and damaging practices in several parts of the supply chain, from mining to manufacturing. Most energy is used during the production and spectacularly wasteful endoflife phase. This is unequally affecting the Global South. The term permacomputing hints at wanting to do better without being naive about this paradox.

permacomputing wiki

from permacomputing.net

Permacomputing is both a concept and a community of practice oriented around issues of resilience and regenerativity in computer and network technology inspired...
Read more...

Cheap Tools 📸🧰

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Jsun McCarty (RIP) playing one of his styrofoam instruments c. 2011

This is a short appreciation post for “cheap tools” and how they help me get started making art.

By “cheap” I’m meaning that they are cost-effective, often almost thought of as disposable, and easy to make again and again with them without exhausting the item or oneself. Pour over coffee makers, long arm staplers, thumb tacks, magnets, double edge safety razors, rulers… Almost all of these can be found in many places, purchased new or many times used, borrowed from friends or found at work.

I started running again this year and purchased some simple t-shirts and a basic wristwatch. With the wristwatch I don’t have to bring my phone when I go jogging. When I hurt my palms on the gym bars I purchased cheap gloves to protect them when I exercise.

These are a few examples of cheap tools. But cheap tools are also pocket notebooks, pens and index cards, push pins, and pads of recycled newsprint. In my studio I tack up large sheets of paper or use a pad for idea mapping. I make to-do lists so I can check things off, or sketch out prototypes.

Further kinds of cheap tools I’m thinking about: an old pocket automatic digital camera I purchased at a swap meet/Flohmarkt here in in Berlin recently. It’s a Powershot camera from 12 years ago or so. It has a SD card to store images, and some built-in filters including black and white and ‘toy camera’ mode that emulates vignetted corners and color shift.

A couple years ago I picked up a microcassette recorder at a Flohmarkt, and when it was inadvertently damaged I later picked up another on ebay. The camera and recorder let me quickly take photos or field recordings. Their forms and built-in functions are quick to use, provide some constraints for the output, and are so easy to get started using. While these are not thought of as tools for making fine art and not professional equipment, I am considering them in the realm of the snapshot cameras celebrated in the 70s to early 2000s, people like Garry Winogrand, Nan Goldin, Wolfgang Tillmans, Martin Parr. I may not be a William Eggleston or Alec Soth or Zoe Strauss but I can try, and my work can also be pleasing.

To extend the idea of cheap tools from hardware to software I’m thinking of cheap tools on the computer for making. Consider Pico-8, the tiny game maker, or p5.js web editor for creative coding. They are capable of being used in many approaches and styles, but they provide a basic foundation to get started without needing anything else.

To be clear the phone can be a cheap tool too, but it’s usually not. It’s an uber swiss army knife. The...

Announcing the ➘Dig Archive 📚🗄️

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This month I released ➘Dig Archive, an archived collection of digitized media art, text, zines, videos, and other saved works from around the net, and beyond.

The ➘Dig Archive is a personal collection of items collected over the years that I revisit and want to make available to others. Some of these can be found elsewhere online but many others can only be found here, or are in danger of disappearing due to link rot, obfuscation, old digital containers and codecs, or other forms of digital brittleness. Items are also in the collection of the Internet Archive whenever possible.

The title is a reference both to the digital as well as digging through the stacks at archives, libraries and record shops.

What items can be found in the ➘Dig Archive?

I’m an artist and musician working in DIY artist-run spaces, academia, and in creative coding community, so the items reflect those interests. I’m particularly a fan of surfacing old software, tools and writing that may have been missed in the rush to embrace the latest technology.

A survey of selections: there are the informal rules of composer/musician John Zorn’s improvised musical “game piece” Cobra that are handed down from musician to musician. There are coloring books, spells and manuals by virtuousic psychedelic synth designer Peter Blasser.

There are whole books, like the New Art/Science Affinities, on the intersection of art and technology, with big photographs and strong artist profiles, which I assign to students in my classes to read but has disappeared from its original website years ago. There are exhibition catalogs, such as for the exhibit FOOD about the same-named artist-run restaurant that included Gordon Matta-Clark within its community. And the Critical Coding Cookbook, a more recent collection of essays, tutorials and interviews with an intersectional feminist approach to teaching and learning programming.

There are teaching activities on the Gee’s bend quilts, from the Philadelpha Museum of Art; multiple zines presenting self-hosted feminist servers; user guides for old game-making software Klik and Play - whose paradigm and system for friendly game-making still hasn’t been equaled today; a slide show by artist and graffiti writer Barry McGee; and photographs of the funeral of Kazimir Malevich, which included a truck affixed with the black square to its bumper.

This and many more items can be found in this small archive, which will slowly grow. I hope you find items that you enjoy and potentially even build your own.

About the Design

The site was built and designed using a modified form of my website builder Panblog and set in Bagnard Sans, inspired by the graffiti of an anonymous prisoner of the napoleonic wars.

➘Dig Archive...