Forty-Four Esolangs - The Art of Esoteric Code

A riveting collection of one artist’s many approaches to esolangs—esoteric programming languages—showcasing the form’s limitless artistic potential.

In
Esolangs are a collaborative form. Each language is a complete world of thought, where esoprogrammers build on the work of esolangers to make new discoveries. The language Velato, for instance, asks programmers to write music as code; while the language creates constraints for the programmer, each programmer brings their own coding and musical sensibility to the language. Other pieces are pure poetic suggestion in the legacy of Yoko Ono’s event scores. These ask the programmer to, for example, follow the paths of the clouds over a single day and construct a language in response that uses those movements as code. Just as Ben Vautier claimed everything as art, this book blurs the lines between computation and everything else.

Product details

• Authors: Allison Parrish, Parrish Allison, Daniel Temkin
• Assisted by: Parrish Allison (Foreword)
• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 23.09.2025
• EAN: 9780262553087
• ISBN: 978-0-262-55308-7
• No. of pages: 176
• Series: Hardcopy
• Subjects: Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > IT, data processing > Programming languages; ART / Digital, ART / Conceptual, History of Art, Programming & scripting languages: general, Electronic, holographic & video art, Digital, video and new media arts, Art & Design Styles: Conceptual Art, Programming and scripting languages: general, Conceptualism, COMPUTERS / Languages / General