In situ: Hacking with esoteric programming

Introduction

This project is about an interactive mixed media installation that creates a bridge between browser VR spaces and physical objects. Through the creation of this environment, the project disposes a dialectic between digitality and theater. Leading to the question: How to create a connection between the digital and physical world? and, is it possible to understand or communicate in a non linear language? Kids and their families can control a VR world, visuals, sound, physical objects and lights through an invented visual programming language. This has different kinds of symbols, an esoteric programming language. Thus, follow by more questions: How to play with digital worlds without the idea of disappearing as a body? Instead of becoming immaterial, rather to habit different territories, manipulate digital things from reality or digital things controlling physical ones. The goal of this is to build an interactive programming puzzle, through intuition and deduction people can execute this environment and connect with programming even without knowing or having any experience on it. Through this playful environment the aim is also to encourage the usage of technologies to create a different perspective on what and how programming and complexity works. In this sense and through this practice is that this project looks for a better and conscious relation between humans and machines.

What and why Esoteric programming

In his paper ‘Esoteric Programming Languages’, Sebastian Morr says that while programming languages are usually designed to be used productively and to be helpful in real-world applications, esoteric programming languages have other goals. Morr also explains that ‘The design of esoteric programming languages can be seen as an artistic process, and the resulting languages can be expressions of human intellect, wit, and aesthetic taste.’ In this sense is that esoteric programming then, doesn’t have an utility purpose, it is more related to an abstract puzzle, to deduction and intuition. Esolangs take on many forms, from playful parodies of existing languages to maddeningly complex languages that test the very limits of what we understand as code (Mateas [&] Montfort 2005). In his paper ‘CRITICAL UNMAKING Toward a Queer Computation ’ Jacob Gaboury, relates esolang to the concept of glitch. It is something through the concept of a glitch that many other researchers like Legacy Russell on Glitch feminism refer too. A glitch is an error, something that is not expected. A glitch doesn’t fit on the standard formats, it is out of the norm. Thus queer computation, glitch and esoteric languages they are all connected through those ideas. To compute queerness, we must begin by acknowledging what queerness offers to a critique of computation. In doing so, we are left with few clear answers and are instead asked to imagine new ways to work against the normalizing influence of our technical culture while maintaining the general functionality of the systems we inhabit. (Jacob, 2018) Esoteric programming proposes then, not only a different way to think programming but also a poetic, playful and artistic way of interacting with code and technology.

Code and theater | Was ist das Digitale Ding?

Theater and code have something in common, they both constantly produce a confluence of languages and medium. The theater disposes at the same time and space a polyphony of disciplines like performance, music, stage design, lighting. They are happening all together and there is no division of languages when the play is happening. With coding it can happen the same, all the processes are happening in the same place, the computer. For the computation there is no division between sound or images, it is data. This information is happening all together in different languages, being able to control different mediums. In this sense, computers are performers too. One of the inspirations for this project is the performative installation of Heiner Goebbels ‘Stifters Dinge’. Goebbels concretes his research in this production, but also this is reflected in his book ‘Aesthetics of absence’ where he develops this concept. The performative installation consists of objects as performers, different elements appearing on a scene without actors on a stage. In his book he cites Elinor Fuchs: ‘A theater of Absence … disperses the center, displaces the Subject, destabilizes meaning.’ With this, Goebbles intends to propose a different way to think about theater, one of the reasons he explains why theater of absence is ‘avoiding the things we expect, the things we have seen, the things we have heard, the things that are usually done on stage’ So the proposal is to create a different narrative or not even have a narrative or a story, this does not mean it is not communicating or saying something but saying it in a different way. For this is that Goebbles explains: ‘When the tree is already being mentioned, you don’t also have to show it. This means that for me it’s a matter of omitting what is already contained in another medium. It’s about trusting in the arts and techniques involved, and particularly trusting in those who are in their element: stage designers, sound designers, musicians, performers, technicians and many more’

Language and trust

No literal narratives give room to the audience to discover or create their own language. Poetics as a way to communicate through art means to interact with imagination and the public's own experience. The usage code on the scene as an artistic/esoteric approach or technology that can be more friendly to users. Inviting people but in this case, mostly kids, to open their own worlds to discover how it works. As the net artist Olia Liania would refer, to create their own personal user experiences. And in the end, on a next level to hack it. To find failures, this leads to wanting to know better how a system works and this is also part of the interaction. Working with kids is also interesting because through this playful interactive installation, they are users but also performers in dialogue with this system. They may not know what is going on, but they want to understand. It is in this sense that code can open the black box (also theater black box), what is always hidden now it is open.