Singing Code

Work that straddles the messiness of natural language and the rigor of code, carrying across qualities of both, is perhaps the dominant theme of this blog, even more so than esolangs themselves.

The work of Sophie Brueckner, a former Silicon Valley software engineer, does this beautifully. Her Crying to Dragon Dictate is a personal favorite, a piece where she literally cries for five minutes into the dictation app, which desperately tries to find semantic value in the sounds of her sobbing.

Crying to Dragon Dictate

A second piece is a performance of code inspired by John Baldessari. Baldessari put Sol LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art to showtune music, paying tribute to LeWitt while reminding us not to take this stuff too seriously. Brueckner sings the code she knows: C++. In a medieval-sounding chant, Brueckner brings our attention to each syllable of the work: code as flow.

Singing Code

More of Brueckner’s singing and code related work can be found here.