The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is pleased to announce a special *THURSDAY* Digital Dialogue on November 17th, at 12:30 in the MITH Conference Room:
"A Box, Darkly: Obfuscation, Weird Languages, and Code Aesthetics"ÂÂ
NICK MONTFORT, University of Pennsylvania
The standard idea of code aesthetics, when such an idea manifests itself at all, allows for programmers to have elegance and clarity as their standards. This talk explores programming practices in which other values are at work, showing that the aesthetics of code must be enlarged to accommodate them. The two practices considered are obfuscated programming and the creation of "weird languages" for coding. Connections between these two practices, and between these and other mechanical and literary aesthetic traditions, are discussed. (This is a presentation of joint work with Michael Mateas.)
Nick Montfort is a doctoral candidate in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT 2003) and co-editor of the New Media Reader (MIT 2003). He is an prolific writer and producer of new media and Vice President of the Electronic Literature Organization. His Web site may be found here: http://nickm.com