The tech industry runs its own chisel-construct cycle, and it runs fast. Every two or three years, a generation of hardware completes the full journey from "new" to "construct" — first chiseled open by product launch spotlights, then digested by the market, finally settling as sediment under the fully formed name "e-waste." A 2015 laptop occupies a position in this cycle similar to an artwork in a museum collection: its story is finished, it is construct.

Lee Tusman refuses this verdict. He is an Associate Professor of New Media and Computer Science at SUNY Purchase and a co-organizer of the Permacomputing NYC meetups. Starting in 2025, he began building L5 — a creative coding library that implements the Processing API in Lua. L5 runs on top of the Love2D framework with a total footprint of roughly 6MB. For comparison: Processing is about 500MB; p5.js plus a browser runs 250–355MB. This numerical gap is not the result of optimization. It is the materialization of a philosophical decision: if you shrink a creative coding environment to six megabytes, it can run on machines that have been sentenced to death — decade-old laptops, outdated phones, Raspberry Pis buried in drawers.

From the SAE perspective, what L5 performs is a reverse chisel-construct operation. The industry's cycle turns hardware from remainder into construct (from "a thing with possibilities" into "waste, fully named and filed"). L5 reverses the direction: it takes construct-sediment — old devices already filed under the complete label "e-waste" — and, through radically lightweight design, turns them back into sites of living remainder. A 2012 ThinkPad, the moment it runs L5, is no longer "electronic waste" but an as-yet-unnamed creative site. Its limitations — constrained RAM, a slow GPU, no bleeding-edge WebGL — become the very conditions that generate remainder. The visual output is sediment of constrained computation, just as Variograph's images are sediment of composed function chains.

L5's choice of Lua as its language aligns with this logic. Lua was born in Brazil in 1993 and evolves with extreme slowness and deliberation, maintaining strong backward compatibility. Where Java and JavaScript manufacture new deprecations and breakages through constant major version updates, Lua remains nearly still. Tusman calls this "resiliency" — programs written in L5 have a high probability of still running years from now with little or no modification. This is a remainder strategy operating on the axis of time: while the entire industry chases "newest," L5 bets on "longest." Its very existence is a political refusal of the upgrade cycle, but its politics are not declarative — they are internalized in the structure through technical choices.

On April 19, 2026, Tusman gave a talk at xHain hack+makespace in Berlin titled "L5: A Creative Coding Response to Permacomputing." L5 remains in early alpha, listed as a Google Summer of Code project through the Processing Foundation. It simultaneously inhabits the cracks between multiple fields: permacomputing has not yet claimed it as a flagship project; the creative coding community (the Processing/p5.js ecosystem) has not fully digested what a 6MB alternative means; sustainable design, educational technology, indie game development — all can see their reflections in L5, but none can fully name it. This is the signature of the beauty of the remainder: the logic is still growing, the naming is still incomplete, it has not yet been swallowed by any established categorical system. Seeing it now matters more than seeing it later — because later it will either be named (become construct) or disappear. Right now, it is alive.

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · SAE Judgment & Aesthetics