INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE SUBPOSSIBLE:
ON PLAY AND ERGODICS IN DANIEL TEMKIN’S WORK
Mediations 02 | Spring 2026
Editor: Jiani Wang
“But how can code be so different from mere writing? The answer to this lies in the unique nature of computer code. It lies not in the fact that code is sublinguistic, but rather in the fact that it is hyperlinguistic. Code is a language, but a very special kind of language. Code is the only language that is executable. As Kittler has pointed out, ‘There exists no word in any ordinary language which does what it says. No description of a machine sets the machine into motion.’”
— Alexander Galloway1
A wall is divided vertically into three equal parts, one red, one yellow and one blue. 1st part: On the red part, a yellow straight, a yellow not straight, and a yellow broken line; and a blue straight, a blue not straight, and a blue broken line; 2nd part: On the yellow part, a blue straight, a blue not straight, and a blue broken line; and a red straight, a red not straight, and a red broken line; 3rd part: On the blue part, a red straight, a red not straight, and a red broken line; and a yellow broken line. The lines are horizontal and equally spaced.… — Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing No. 309 (1978)
An esolang—a type of code art practice—is a set of computer programming instructions that situates language against itself by exposing its limits, exaggerating its rules, and reconfiguring its relation to meaning and legibility. All this is carried out toward a deliberate mismeasurement of excess, constraint, and opacity, not at all disappearing into the seamless functionality of actionable mechanics. They insist on being noticed —absurdly so— as systems, often by frustrating or overcomplicating the very act of use. In this sense, along with experimental games like Getting Over It, esolongs often resemble a Rube Goldberg machine, where simple outcomes or exercises are achieved through superfluous, circuitous means. Their aesthetic is anti-instrumental, but in a way that is ergodic. They take what is presumed to be purely functional and render it strange through impossible syntax, extreme constraints, or conceptual jokes that become operational rules, aestheticizing the friction between instruction as an ordinarily underlying framework that you’re supposed to ignore and the visibly clumsy execution of rules. They are a form of play.
Daniel Temkin, Forty-Four Esolangs (MIT Press, 2025).
Forty-Four Esolangs (MIT Press, 2025) is a collection of 44 esoteric programming languages written by artist and esolanger Daniel Temkin. These esolangs fit the genre’s mold. They are excessive, bizarre, or otherwise “impractical,” but also incredibly poetic and introspective. They produce opaque outputs or operate according to logics that border on the nonsensical, but in doing so, they articulate an artistic refusal of the instrumental rationality that governs most computational systems. In these lines of creative instruction, the legacy of Georges Perec and the Oulipo group of writers and mathematicians is palpable. Language 12 is directly inspired by one of Oulipo’s lipogrammatic exercises called Prisoner’s Constraint. Here is the prompt:
LANGUAGE 12.
a programmatic language where only tall
lower-case letters hold programmatic
meaning: b, d, g, h, j, k, l, p, q, t
other letters might explain the code
or hide its programmatic nature
every text is a program
Language 12 illustrates a unique language that begins with its own misuse to arrive as a form of play and endless iteration. Temkin shows how it was realized as Captive (2024), a “stack machine” whose architecture is “organized around a data stack”, making it “amenable to nilads, instructions that take no arguments.”3 What does this mean for the uninitiated? For me, the beauty is in the provocation of the prompt, which moves beyond the need to understand programming language, or even care how rules are executed through them, toward a desire to think through its core idea. A zero-argument operation is self-contained, and a system involving constant pushing is the kind of abstraction that shows how language shifts from mere communication to affective operation. “Every text is a program” indicates the effects will be indeterminate and unpredictable but also shapeable, as demonstrated by the incoherent but unique interpretation of a line from Moby Dick and a passage from the Bible, Genesis 1:1. Each prompt is explored in this manner, with Temkin offering additional context and iterations in an exercise that reminds us that code is a form of philosophy.
The Oulipian constraint, often celebrated as a generative device, has also been read through a masculinist logic of mastery, where the author is the architect of rules and the text is the demonstration of virtuosity under pressure. But Temkin’s book of esolangs does not aim for such a 20th century tautology. It operates almost as a conversation—as text meant to be read by a human (written semantically) and as prompts for code (elsewhere written syntactically) to test out on a machine. The way Temkin sees it, “The prompt is thus meant not to be realized as a functioning language, but rather to reflect on what it means to name something.”4 More than that, for me, esoteric languages enact a kind of détournement from within by re-routing the “authority” of code (or any other language) toward ends that are playful, critical, and strange, even sublime. I read Forty-Four Esolangs as a series of thought experiments where language gives shape to speculative gestures that may or may not get realized. Language 1 invites us to consider our computer systems as if they were sentient, an increasingly relatable exercise, given our current interactions with chatbots. Language 8 reorients our understanding of numbers as fixed, exact metrics and instead accepts approximate, relational values. Language 38 encourages a meditative state: “an esolang of unmediated thought, pure affect without words.”5 Language 39 conceptually facilitates contact with the spirit world: “a language for programmatically communing with the dead.”6
Temkin’s esolangs support that critical edge where language becomes a commentary on the very idea of systems claiming to be purely rational, efficient, or universal. As prompts, they usher a kind of metacognition, enabling us to recognize and confront our own thinking and on the role that language plays in shaping processes we usually take for granted. Reading Forty-Four Esolangs is like traversing an ergodic text: it disrupts the flow of ordinary readerly transmission. It requires deciphering a unique logic and conceptual structure, and despite being numbered, the esolangs do not follow a linear sequence. I borrow ergodic from Espen Aarseth, whose own appropriation of the term from physics is derived from the Greek ergon and hodos, meaning, respectively, “work” and “path.” Aarseth adopted this term to describe the mechanics and affective nature of cybertexts, likening them to an experimental tradition in certain types of literature where “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text.”7 Like Oulipian writing, ergodic texts are built on constraint, where limitations produce richness and uncharted pathways within language itself. But constraints also produce unexpected flexibility, making way for multiple interpretations that can lead to new iterations. Temkin’s Language 13 reframes computation as a durational, image-based process, communicating through photographs instead of text:
LANGUAGE 13.
a programming language whose programs
are progressions of photographs
code is written in the change from one
photo to the next in:
* brightness
* hue
* contrast
each is read as::
* less (0)
* same (1)
* more (2)
together, these determine computer instructions
Its realization in Light Pattern extends Fluxus artist George Brecht’s Three Lamp Events (1961) by translating a performative, minimalist score, concerned with the simple act of turning lamps on and off, into a system of photographic inscription, amplifying both code and translation. Using an RGB color model, the lamps are photographed according to the Light Pattern rules. Longer exposure times make the lamps appear brighter, and multiple frames are blended together so it looks like more than one lamp is on at the same time.
Animated GIF of Daniel Temkin’s Light Pattern: Three Lamp Events.
The aesthetic pleasure in these creative examples comes from the game-like struggle they produce in exposing their system’s playful arbitrariness. This playfulness extends to Forty-Four Eslolang’s dual function as a collection of esoteric languages meant for the human reader and for the computer. Given their quality of procedural estrangement, esoteric languages defamiliarize code into a kind of ergodic procedurality that seems to be shared (perhaps on equal terms?) between human and computer. Esolangs are both written and legible through extraordinary effort, and sometimes their executions reveal their limits, leaving their full conceptual heft as (uniquely human) thought experiments. From a media-theoretical perspective, the aesthetic qualities of limitation and the tension produced by the partially realizable prompt amplify Friedrich Kittler’s claim that code is the only language that does exactly what it says. For Kittler, code represents a collapse of the distinction between signifier and action. Writing code produces effects directly, without the mediation of interpretation in the humanistic sense.8 But esolangs reveal a powerful dialectic between programmer and code through the appearance of instability or self-undermining execution, reflecting the whimsy and experimentation of the esolanger himself. Rules can be written to be “unruly” by introducing a kind of glitch at the level of language design as a system that behaves like, but is not, a bug. Traditional glitch art often emerges from the accidental or intentional breakdown of an existing system, such as compression errors, corrupted files, and hardware failures. But here, esolangs promote an aesthetic of malfunction without technically being so. Their error-like ways are not accidents needing to be fixed. They are the main objective and core aesthetic.
Esolangs help us understand where the concept of glitch offers an indispensable mode of thinking. Temkin began as a glitch artist around 2007 and has since maintained a glitch ethos that informs everything he makes. Esolangs emerged in his practice from a glitch philosophy that shapes the reorientation of instruction and the terms of language, and this approach extends into Temkin’s visual practice as well, such as his Dither Studies series of paintings (2016-present). Dithering is a technique used in digital imaging, and it is fundamental to digital photography to simulate gradients with limited color palettes. It is a technical procedure, but it can also be understood as a philosophical gesture. Dithering distributes “error” by scattering pixels of different values, or patterns of noise, to fill in tones of color that are not directly encoded. It is both a negotiation with the limits of representation and a simulation of nothing. What appears as continuous is constructed discontinuity. This operation resonates with the long-standing critique of presence and immediacy in Jacques Derrida’s notion of différance.9 In this way, dithering marks the impossibility of a pure, unmediated image. The “true” gradient is never present. It is deferred, approximated through a play of differences that can only cohere at a distance. The image does not present itself as such but emerges through a field of substitutions, as tiny absences we perceive as presences. At the same time, dithering can be read through Gilles Deleuze’s concept of difference in itself.10 Each simulated pixel does not simply fail to be the intended value. It actively participates in a generative system where this difference produces the perceptual whole. The image is not degraded by error but constructed through the productive use of noise.
Daniel Temkin, Dither Studies: Floyd-Steinberg, 28.2% Green, 2022: acrylic on panel; 96 × 47 inches.
In the Dither Studies paintings, dithering encapsulates these possibilities and becomes yet another means of exploring and redefining the boundaries that separate legibility and translation from limitation and mishap. These works are the hand-renderings of images that began with custom software, where each image is the result of a set of instructions that determine how pixels are arranged, how colors are distributed, and how patterns emerge. The program generates animated GIFs and still patterns reflecting color pairings that defy dithering logic. Dithering is reimagined in an alternate computational system in which the pixel is not square but triangular or hexagonal. By shifting the basic unit of the image, the work foregrounds the fact that the digital form is structured by design choices rather than technical inevitabilities, which Temkin then painstakingly translates into painting. In this way, the process functions both as a practical image-making device and as a framework for thinking through how systems can be reinterpreted and materialized in other media. The final painted works reintroduce the contingencies of the physical world of acrylic, large canvases, brushstrokes, textures, and the durational and imperfect realities of painting precise patterns by hand, whose details are refreshingly visible on close inspection.
There is an unexpected ergodic dimension to reading these paintings. Like conventional programming languages, image dithering is not meant to be noticed, rather it was designed to be invisible while it deceives our visual perception. Dithering also suggests that digital imaging and digital photography are automatic systems that resemble automatic painting. As William J. Mitchell observes, “An impressionist painter looking at a scene and converting it to discrete brush strokes and a digital image-capture device are both applying sampling and filtering strategies.” Automation ensures that digital image construction “samples and filters mechanically, objectively, and consistently.”11 The notion of shared strategies across seemingly disparate creative processes toward a reconfigured system logic is further amplified in Temkin’s Straightened Trees, a series of gelatin silver prints that combine analog processes with digital manipulation.
Daniel Temkin, Straightened Trees: Central City Phoenix, 2019; silver gelatin print; 60 × 48½ inches.
In Straightened Trees (2016-present), each image complicates the straightforward index of reality attributed to photographs. Images undergo layers of manipulations between chemicals and code that strategically transform the production and interpretation of recorded objects and environments. Temkin begins by using a large-format camera to photograph trees, then subjects these images to a custom algorithmic process that forces their irregular shapes into strict vertical alignment. The trees are rendered as improbably upright, while the surrounding environment of buildings, cables, and other infrastructural elements are visually distorted, bending in ways that appear both precise and uncanny. This intervention displaces the conventional grounds of visual orientation, denying the built world of concrete and telephone poles its usual role as a marker of stability to unsettle the world’s geometry. By working with a historically loaded photographic process, Temkin anchors these computational interventions in a medium traditionally associated with documentary authority and tonal precision. These analog qualities lend credibility to the images, even as their visual logic appears chaotic and destabilizes photographic truth.
Additionally, large-format film is a medium-specific condition that makes the work possible. The high level of detail afforded by the format provides a dense visual field that can withstand subsequent computational manipulation without breaking down into visible artifacts. In this sense, the analog image functions as a kind of buffer, preserving continuity even as the image is restructured through digital processes. This choice underscores how different imaging systems distribute and sustain information. Large-format film captures detail as a continuous gradation, which allows it to absorb transformation in ways that lower-resolution digital images simply cannot. The resulting photographs are therefore shaped by an interplay between analog capture and computational adjustment, where the properties of one medium shape the operations of another. The hybrid nature of these images is a reminder of the continuity between analog and digital media, once again challenging the notion that they represent fundamentally separate domains. Temkin’s code applies a different kind of automated process added to the alchemical one that precedes it, revealing them as interconnected systems capable of being translated into the other.
The work of Daniel Temkin occupies a distinctive position within contemporary media art that traverses the interstitial spaces between language, computation, and visual forms. His practice interrogates the logic, constraints, and expressive limits of computational systems, producing intermedia works that are as much philosophical propositions as they are aesthetic objects. His work can be understood as operating in the latent spaces of the subpossible, beneath the threshold of visibility and expectation. In doing so, Temkin’s practice expands the field of the visible, suggesting that beneath any given image, interface, or language lies a range of unrealized variations. Constraint is foregrounded as both method and condition of experience, a dynamic that engenders a glitch ethos and reveals things about how we think, situating the work within a lineage that includes Georges Perec, the Oulipo, Fluxus, and conceptual art while also resonating with theoretical frameworks articulated by Friedrich Kittler, Espen Aarseth, and other thinkers. With an acute sense of the affordances and limitations of each medium, Temkin pushes past habit and convention to open a space where subpossibilities can take form, persisting precisely through each medium’s own limitations.
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Notes:
1. Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 165-166.
2. Daniel Temkin, Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2025), 35.
3. Daniel Temkin, Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code, 95.
4. Daniel Temkin, email message to author, April 6, 2026.
5. Daniel Temkin, Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code, 61.
6. Daniel Temkin, Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code, 62.
7. Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 1.
8. See Friedrich Kittler, “There is No Software,” CTheory (October 18, 1995).
9. See Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
10. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
11. William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 60-62.