Daniel Temkin Email & Phone Number

New York, Ny, Us

Null Island

Esoteric.Codes covers self-expression in the text of code.It began in 2011 as an interview series with esolangers, those who make unconventional programming languages. Esolangs are often created as challenges to programmers, who experience the language by figuring out how to write practical code in strange syntaxes and twisted logic. Others constitute an avant-garde of computer science, challenging accepted definitions of code, language, and computer.In early 2015, I received a huge piece of early encouragement in the form of the ArtsWriters.org grant from Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation. Two years later It was written in residence at the New Museum’s New Inc tech incubator.The works covered in esoteric.codes are sometimes highly dematerialized, testing the limits of what can be considered a language or a program. They are understandable in the legacy of Fluxus event scores, Oulipian constraint sets, and other movements that cross language and performance or language and constraints. The blog includes radical departures from the norms of coding, bringing the ambiguities of human speech to the code level, or embracing multicoding where one text has many literal meanings. Projects that challenge computer science history or dominant cultures of programming are considered, as are jokes and trippy idea-art by programmers at play, sometimes as sketches of languages that are impossible by design. Its subjects emphasize software over hardware, are open-ended, collaborative, or with no fixed final form. In 2018, a tablet version was commissioned by ZKM, to be exhibited at the Goethe Institut in Mumbai and ZKM's museum in Karlsruhe, Germany. Esoteric.Codes posts have been expanded into papers presented at conferences, both hacker and academic, including SIGGRAPH, xCoAx, Gulaschprogrammiernacht, and Media Art Histories, and in art venues like Pioneer Works. Individual projects have been picked up by Wired, the Outline, and other publications.