Esolangs as Hacker Folk-Art and Computational Resistance

Building on the Friday night presentation of Forty-Four Esolangs at ZKM (https://zkm.de/en/2026/02/daniel-temkin-forty-four-esolangs), this is a deeper dive into esolangs as a community-based form. We’ll look at esolangs as a dialogue between the esolangers who make them and the esoprogrammers who expand how they can be used, and make their own discoveries about the languages. In this moment, when AI tools reinforce a bland, corporatized monoculture of code, esolangs remind us that we can create our own alternatives, to address not only how code reads but who it is for. There will be opportunities to answer questions about the technical side of language design and to share ideas or works-in-progress.

Find information on our weekly open sessions format: https://entropia.de/Open_Sessions