Event

Designing Impractical and Esoteric Programming Languages

This beginner-friendly session will be part survey, part workshop, exploring how to use programming languages themselves as a means of personal expression. We'll look at languages that use images as code -- as music, or as a series of photographs -- languages that speak only of the past, that consider only the spaces between words, or that express doubts about the very commands they carry out.

A programming language is perhaps the most direct conduit between human thought and computer logic. Intervening in this space, programmers and artists create systems that explore our relationship with the machine. Gesture and connotation, often downplayed in traditional code, become central. Students will design their own languages and take the first steps in building interpreters for them. Systems art, Fluxus, Oulipo, and language theory will be mined for strategies in constructing new grammars.

Teacher

Daniel Temkin makes images, programming languages, and interactive pieces that explore systems of logic and language. He was awarded the Creative Capital / Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for his esoteric.codes blog, which covers programming languages as art. Daniel has presented at SXSW, SIGGRAPH, CAA, Media Art Histories, ISEA, GLI.TC/H, and hacker conferences such as NOTACON, and published in Leonardo, World Picture Journal, Grafik Magazine and others. He has shown at galleries such as Higher Pictures and Transfer, and his work was a critic's pick in ArtNews, the New York Times and the Boston Globe.