Every exhibition is a new achievement, which we always love to accompany with an event where, alongside new information, we can connect with everyone who helped bring the exhibition to life and everyone interested in the themes we explore. This time we’re extra excited to be joined by a guest of honor, Daniel Temkin.
You are cordially invited to the opening of a special exhibition created under the auspices of the UNESCO Source Code Foundation, which is coming to life in our museum.
The Source Code Exhibition is unusual because it treats computer program code as the primary exhibit, rather than supplementary material. Computer program code is semantically rich and multi-layered, transcending its technical purpose. It can reveal the author’s intentions, reflect the historical, social, and cultural environment in which it was created, and express the authors’ personal style, creativity, and aesthetic choices.
Opening ceremony guest of honor:
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.