Esolangs as a Hacker Folk Art
08-15, 20:00–20:50 (US/Eastern), Tobin

The most important computational art is happening far from museums, immersive art “experiences,” and the smoldering ruins of NFT platforms. Esolangs, like demos and code golf, are hacker folk art, born entirely outside the art world, yet beginning to get wider attention as more digital artists and poets contribute to the form. This should not be a surprise with the critical work it has done to explore our relationship with technology, the politics of computing, the aesthetics of code, among many other subjects. This talk will present esolangs, not as a loose collection of language associated by algorithmic complexity, but a social history of how each language influenced the next, drawing from ten years of interviews for the blog esoteric.codes. It will look at esolangs as more than technical wizardry and consider aesthetics for this form that often pretends to eschew aesthetics entirely.

Daniel Temkin created languages like Entropy, FatFinger, and Folders. A collection of his work, called Forty-Four Esolangs, will be published by MIT Press this September. His blog esoteric.codes has covered esolangs for over ten years. Funded by Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation, it was exhibited at ZKM for their 2018 Open Codes show and written in residence at the New Museum’s NEW INC incubator. Daniel has spoken about esolangs at conferences including SXSW, SIGGRAPH, Gulaschprogrammiernacht, FOSDEM, Media Art Histories, and many others.

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