Daniel Temkin

@dtemkin

Esolangs are Systems Art SITE: BLOG: BOOK: Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code: (2025, MIT Press)

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Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· 10h

This is back online at a new url: mag.iidrr.com/instructions... INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE SUBPOSSIBLE: On Play and Ergodics in Daniel Temkin's Work by Natasha Chuk

A Straightened Tree that warps the builds around it (photographically)

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· 4d

Two clouds as I remember them

Kind of a muscular bird looking cloud? To me anyway

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· 6d

This piece asks if LLMs are moving us toward a monoculture of code style; pic shows how it's spread the use of 42 as random seed number. arxiv.org/pdf/2607.13077

Chart showing how use of the number 42 as random number seed ramps up alongside ChatGPT

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· 17d

Two more clouds as I remember them

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· 19d

In CoralScript, text is encoded as plant-like arrangements of hexagonal tiles codeberg.org/lipwig/coral...

Example of Coral Script and the words Coral Script

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· 25d

Recreated two clouds I saw in the last week, how I remember them. Yellow was during peak wildfire smoke

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· Jul 6

Sometimes I make smaller Dither Studies. It’s a greater challenge to capture the structured chaos of a dither in a small space. But also an opportunity to experiment with color and shape before going really big. Each is 6” × 18” or 24”.

Dither in White, Orange and Teal (triangular pixels)

Dither in yellow and blue, rectangular pixels

Dither in orange and teal, triangular pixels

Dither in green, magenta, and lavender (triangular pixels)

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· Jun 22

Settling in for Open Source Week at the UN

Seat at UN conference hall, labeled Edit-a-thon

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· May 7

Doctrine of type conversion in Christianity and JavaScript

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· Apr 28

Welcome to the Bronx, aka Home of the Big Booty Justice

Electrical box on bridge, scrawled with “Your now entering the Home of the Big Booty Justice”

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· Apr 26

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· Apr 22

Events beyond my understanding have brought me to a Supply Chain Gala — now hoping to hear the gossip beyond just the Hormuz stuff

Selfie with Welcome to Supply Chain Awards and Dinner Gala 2026 sign

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· Apr 6

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

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· Apr 6

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

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.

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· Apr 6

So… the install of Josh Citerella is a blank wall telling us to download the podcast?

Joshua Citerella wall label about podcast Doomscroll on empty wall

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· Mar 25

This is still my only wizard book (well, this and the JS version)

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· Mar 18

Went to a party at a collector's house last weekend and hung out with my own art :)

Me and three dithery blue/gold paintings

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· Mar 9

OMMMMG! Last night @lastweektonight.com played the infamous Col Sanders clip from General Hospital -- but cut just before he tells how fought off hackers with his Malbolge programming skills (which the Col mispronounces) First reported on esoteric codes here: esoteric.codes/blog/kfc-col...

Col Sanders saying: as Damian Spinelli it's not his fault he doesn't know mal Bogle

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· Feb 8

The tall, elven, German, enby hackers have spoken

Emergency cat ears, sign with Notice: cat ears must be worn

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· Feb 5

Yeah, don't buy tickets for my event at Glasgow CCA; the venue has ceased to exist. The former employees are locked out of their email and can't respond! Full article from The Scotsman: www.scotsman.com/arts-and-cul...

Tickets for already-scheduled events, including a talk by Daniel Temkin entitled Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code, are accessible to buy on the CCA's website - with the CCA’s ticketing site still fully functional and accepting payments.

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· Feb 1

My #FOSDEM talk as summarized in image by Jeroen Heijmans over on mastodon Includes many esolangs I discussed as examples of three genres of esolang (Turing Tarpit, multicoding, and non-English [standing in for many others critical of tech defaults]). And No Signal for when my screen blinked out

Hacker Folk Art of Esoteric Code, lots of text bubbles with esolang names and a big No Signal

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· Jan 30

Highlight of my time in Paris was this wonderful Source Code exhibition by @softwareheritage.org at @unesco.org, including my Rivulet language, Lingdong’s wenyan-lang, source code of ELIZA, and obfuscated code by Adrian Cable. Code is culture!

Rivulet in the Source Code exhibition catalog

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· Jan 23

Off to Paris for the Software Heritage exhibition www.unesco.org/en/articles/... at UNESCO. Here's a short program in Rivulet, one of the featured languages

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· Jan 7

NYC folks: for those who missed it, here’s another chance to hear me present work from Forty Four Esolangs, at next week’s WordHack

WordHack Thursday Jan 15, 7 - 10pm. Wonderville, 1186 Broadway, Brooklyn. $15

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· Jan 5

New on esoteric codes: yayimhere, creator of Karvity and Utral, whose work studies the strange contradictions of minimalist systems esoteric.codes/blog/yayimhe...

yayimhere design (abstracted sorting algorithm diagram)

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· Jan 2

Just de-installed this work from a Dec talk at P&T Knitwear — they understood the book as a starting place to understand language design as a creative practice and let me bring some of that experience to the space #esolangs

A series of red, green and blue photos with description of how they work as source code

The Rivulet programming language; looks like squiggles

Me presenting, view from up in the bleachers

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· Dec 24

thorn, a programming language to build ascii animations www.reddit.com/r/Programmin...

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· Dec 4

Dunno what eggpunk is, must be what all the other 84 year olds listen to

Top genres: Shoegaze, Egg Punk, Cool Jazz, Alternative, Garage Rock

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· Nov 30

The one album I’ll never get bored of

Daniel Temkin@dtemkin· Nov 24

Popped in for the last day of my Dither Studies up at @movingimagenyc.bsky.social