Daniel Temkin
Friday, August 15, 2025: 8:00 pm (Tobin 201/202): 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.