Lee Tusman is a New York-based artist and educator who spent roughly a decade making work in p5.js. Then, quietly, his older pieces began to break. Not because his ideas went stale — because Chrome updated its audio security policy, requiring a user gesture before any sound could play. Whole sketches went silent overnight. The code was still there; the logic was intact; the runtime had simply moved on without warning. This named something he had been circling: creative coding, as currently practiced, runs on time-bound infrastructure.

In December 2025, he released L5 — a creative coding library written in Lua, built on the Love2D framework, with an API that deliberately mirrors Processing and p5.js function names, but with no browser dependency underneath. The entire install is around six megabytes, compared to Processing's roughly five hundred. A user tested it on a 2009 laptop and found it ran cleanly, with only the shader module needing to be commented out for that era's graphics hardware. Six megabytes. A sixteen-year-old machine. Still drawing.

The already-construct of creative coding is a cluster of assumptions about nowness: JavaScript, modern browsers, current GPU drivers, API stability measured in three-to-five-year windows. These assumptions aren't designed — they accumulate as tools follow platforms follow upgrade cycles. When Tusman chisels, he removes all three layers of nowness at once: no JavaScript, no browser, no dependency on modern graphics card features. In their place: Lua, whose core language changed minimally from version 5.0 to 5.4 across twenty years; and Love2D, maintained since 2008, tiny, few dependencies, portable to Raspberry Pi and aging desktops. What remains after this chisel is the sketching practice itself — the draw() loop, the coordinate system, mouse and keyboard events, geometric primitives. These things never belonged to JavaScript in the first place. L5 makes visible what was always true: the core of creative coding is a remainder that was living inside these frameworks without needing their speed, their nowness, their three-year horizon.

But L5's deepest remainder is a temporal question. Tusman titled a 2026 workshop "Computational Poetry for 100 Years." Creative coding's construct sets three-to-five years as the default unit of a sketch's expected lifespan. L5 asks: if you replace that unit with one hundred years, what survives? This question is itself a remainder — it falls outside the standard upgrade cycle, outside retro-nostalgia (which is already a named construct: the mourning of old remainders), and outside "sustainable art," a category that the art world is just now absorbing and naming. No existing category can fully contain the hundred-year question yet. That incompleteness is the mark of structural aliveness.

"Permacomputing" is being slowly digested into an art-world category. Monoskop has a page. NODE Forum ran workshops. Academic papers are arriving, including one co-authored by Tusman and p5.js project lead Kit Kuksenok. Once "permacomputing aesthetics" hardens into a curated exhibition label with critical essays and institutional backing, L5 will be a historical data point in a completed argument — sediment of a chisel-construct cycle that has closed. Right now, the community forming around L5 has no fixed name for itself: twenty people at a first meetup in a Queens commons space, a code jam at a Philadelphia library, a workshop on hundred-year poetry at Gray Area in San Francisco, Google Summer of Code contributors expanding the library's sound and video modules. These are not yet a movement. The name hasn't landed. The cycle hasn't closed. This is when the remainder is most alive to look at.

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