What happens when programming languages aim not at functionality and efficiency, but at irritation and reflection, or act like poetry? In this beginner-friendly workshop, we’ll explore esolangs: languages that do exactly that.
They include code written as images, as sound, or in forms that no computer can decode. Each esolang offers a new take on language design as a medium for expression, critique, and play. Writing code becomes a way to participate in an artwork, performing its logic, and collaborating with its underlying ideas. While many esolangs live in the digital space, the concepts we explore need not be digital at all: they might run only in our heads.
In the second half, he’ll walk us through different approaches to building an esolang. Participants can share off-the-cuff ideas for feedback from the group and pointers on how to concretize them into working languages. Later we will be introduced to the first steps toward creating interpreters, and answer questions from more experienced coders who want advice on advancing their projects.
The workshop will include a coffee break, last 3 hours, and be held in English.
Daniel Temkin makes photography, programming languages, and painted work examining human irrationality through our engagement with logical systems. His Forty-Four Esolangs is the first artist’s monograph of programming languages (MIT Press, 2025); he has done readings at Museum of the Moving Image, Gray Area, ZKM, and many universities, including Columbia, USC, and Carnegie Mellon. It includes Olympus, where code is written as prayer to the Greek gods, and Valence, which brings to code the structural ambiguity and homonymy of natural language. His blog esoteric.codes has covered esolangs (esoteric, or non-practical, programming languages) since 2011. The blog has broadened the esolang community, creating dialogue with digital artists and writers from a diversity of viewpoints who engage with the text of code. Esoteric.codes has been exhibited at ZKM. It won the ArtsWriters.org grant from Creative Capitol / Warhol Foundation and was written at the New Museum’s NEW INC residency. Temkin has written on esolangs for Hyperallergic as well as academic journals like Digital Humanities Quarterly and Leonardo. Temkin’s Dither Studies was recently shown as an interactive installation, filling the lobby of Museum of the Moving Image and, as a large-scale painted work at Buffalo AKG.