My mini game about driving in Puerto Rico is quite developed! Check it out: iloveepoetry.org/creative/lac...
It also has a demo mode. Soon I will reach the stage of translating it, but that will be tricky because the language choices are are almost entirely Puerto Rican idioms and curses.
However, imo, esolangs outdo much computational art in terms of the humor, critique, and conceptual play we associate with idea art. They came from different places but have similar ends
The great thing about publishing this as a monograph is I can make those associations more freely in my own work
Yes, esolangs are a hacker folk art first -- and most people who make them do not frame their work as idea art, but build on aesthetics that come from within programming practice. I've written about that here: dhq.digitalhumanities.org/vol/17/2/000...
Found an esolang too late to include in the esoNatLang piece and mentioned it on Discord. Turns out the designer of the lang hadn't seen that someone had fully implemented it (which is what I'd linked to). So I randomly brought it to their attention! The esolang community is amazing
Well, your last sentence makes me very happy
Here's an archive version of my 2020 paper, The Aesthetics of Multicoding Esolangs. These are languages where code has multiple readings: code as image, code as poetry, where those two readings constrain each other and the programmer writes with both in mind. danieltemkin.com/Content/Esol...
Excited to feature your work!
Esolangs that embrace natural language can go much further than adopting silly keywords. Here are five languages that bring linguistic complexity into code. esoteric.codes/blog/five-es...
happy tax day
It’s a monograph of my langs and very much an art book. Feeling a bit nervous as to what you’ll think as it owes so much to your work, but also is so different. I hope it raises interest / awareness of esolangs and brings more to this space
Looks good to me!
Still can’t believe we have a show entirely of source code! Now headed to the Sorbonne… includes my Rivulet lang, Lingdong’s wenyan-lang and a classic piece of obfuscated code by Adrian Cable
Just leave twitter, then you won’t have to hear from them at all!
ATTENTION BELOVED RESEARCHERS!
The 20th annual SIGBOVIK conference will be held this Friday, April 10th, 5PM ET, in Rashid Auditorium of Carnegie Mellon University!!!! We will also stream the conference live here: youtube.com/live/JazxeftHDwY
And Rivulet is here: github.com/rottytooth/R...
(as I forgot to set up the link listed on that last image lol)
Rivulet’s design philosophy is inspired by the compactness of mazes, Anni Albers’s Meanders series, and space-filling algorithms. The glyphs above and below accomplish the same thing. One strand is a null value. One strand adds the number one. The other copies the value from element 0 to element 2 of a list. These are parts of a Fibonacci program.
Above is one variation of the complete Fibonacci program. Another programmer might write this algorithm very differently. https://danieltemkin.com/Esolangs/Rivulet
Rivulet is a programming language of flowing strands: each line has a hook to mark its beginning. Strands appear in tightly-packed blocks of code called glyphs, which begin and end with short vertical markers. How a strand meanders through the space of the glyph determines its meaning.
The strands are drawn with psuedographic, or box-drawing, characters, used to build user interfaces in early computing. The individual characters, e.g. │ or ┌, are units of space and movement for the strand. The glyph is numbered in successive primes.
Each type of strand has a different reading. Value strands are solid, with hooks pointing up or to the left. Each unit of space they move to the right adds that prime, left subtracts. Reference strands end with a small gap, pointing to a location in memory. Action strands determine commands, and question strands are for looping and branching.
Now that Algorithmic Art Assembly 3.0 is complete (organized by @sideb0ard.bsky.social), here are my pages for the zine (which is worth seeking out if you can find one) They introduce my Rivulet language
Yeah, had a few stand-outs (as it always does), but felt less substantial than usual
Second floor of the Biennial
Joshua Citerella wall label about podcast Doomscroll on empty wall
So… the install of Josh Citerella is a blank wall telling us to download the podcast?
Three game exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art.
New Blog: Let Games Die
"Let Code Die is rooted in a trust that if we have code that we like and we lose it, we can write it again. What would it mean to trust ourselves as game developers, designers, critics and players in the same way?"
www.possibilityspace.org/blog/posts/l...
Why don't we have waterparks for other fluids
One way to define an esolang may be that its utility is in the idea or question it explores, rather than its practical use. If that can be done without simulating its machine — if it only runs in our heads — that can sometimes be enough
Mine is more a book OF esolangs than about them; just noting as I still want to write one covering esolangs more generally, but the opportunity to do an artist’s monograph came first
The self-described pedant who called out my wording might be right… but my version flows better so I’m keeping it
Literally 25 comments on that question
Here’s the actual lang. It’s a functional language for only one program (per person), which changes over time. Anything that scrolls off the screen is forgotten: danieltemkin.com/Esolangs/Memo/
