Submissions for Issue #6

All are welcome to submit for possible publication in future issues, but please see the information about our reading periods and the specific calls for each issue. We plan for the information about each N+1th issue to be included with the release of the Nth issue.

Taper #6 invites submissions in response to the theme A Throw of the Dice. The title is inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolirá le hasard” (“A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance”) and we encourage submissions that play on its themes or visual style. We also seek submissions that address randomness, uncertainty, chance, dice used in games, and other perceptions of the number 6—works that take this opportunity to reflect on the notion of a sixth sense, premonitions, predictions, using dice for divination, and meditations on luck, cheating (i.e. loaded dice), and fairness. Alternatively, works could address abstract aspects of the number six, such as its relations to geometrical figures (cubes, hexagons) or poetic forms (iambic hexameter, sestets, sestinas, etc.).

Submission Details

Timeline

Submissions for this issue will be accepted until January 20, 2021 February 7, 2021 at 11:59 PM EST. (Yes, the deadline has been extended!) Taper #6 will be published in Spring 2021.

We invite submissions from those interested in participating at throw@badquar.to. Simply attach your work in one zip file containing your HTML page files (up to five per author will be considered).

Todd Anderson (“Checking In”) is a digital poet and web artist, currently working on HitchHiker, a Chrome extension for live performance inside the browser. He is probably best known as the host and curator of WordHack, a 6-year running language+technology talk series at Babycastles in NYC. See toddwords.com.
Derek Beaulieu (“Quarters”) is the author/editor of over twenty collections of poetry, prose, and criticism, including two volumes of his selected work, Please, No More Poetry (2013) and Konzeptuelle Arbeiten (2017). His most recent volume of fiction, a, A Novel, was published by Paris’s Jean Boîte Editions. Beaulieu has exhibited his visual work across Canada, the United States, and Europe and has won multiple local and national awards for his teaching and dedication to students. Derek Beaulieu holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Roehampton University and is the Director of Literary Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. He can be found online at derekbeaulieu.wordpress.com.
Kyle Booten (editorial collective member) is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. As this fall’s poet-in-digital-residence at Nokturno.fi, he will debut his computationally-generated liturgical work To Pray Without Ceasing. His poems written with the assistance or interference of algorithms have appeared or are forthcoming in venues such as Lana Turner, Fence, Boston Review, and Denver Quarterly Review. See kylebooten.me.
J. R. Carpenter (“A Storm in 2K”) is an artist, writer, and researcher working across performance, print, and digital media. Her web-based work The Gathering Cloud won the New Media Writing Prize 2016. Her poetry collection An Ocean of Static was highly commended by the Forward Prizes 2018. Her new collection This is a Picture of Wind (Longbarrow Press 2020) is based on a web app of the same name. A fellow of the Eccles Centre at the British Library and the Moore Institute at NUI Galway, she is writer in residence at University of Alberta September 2020–May 2021. See luckysoap.com.
Richard A Carter (“A. Square Tweets Recollections of Spaceland”) is an artist and lecturer in digital media. Carter’s academic and creative practice investigates the potentialities of seeing, knowing, and writing at the intersection between human and machinic actors. See more at richardacarter.com.
Angela Chang (“Crumbs,” editorial collective member) enjoys tinkering with technology to craft shared experiences and bring people closer together. She researches how sensorial design can enhance cognition, collaboration, and presence. Chang is interested in simplifying representations of hidden or complex relationships to improve understanding and communication. People across five continents, from rural children in Ethiopia to audiences in Japan, have experienced her work. She founded TinkerStories to encourage parents to learn storytelling rituals that help with early literacy. She is a member of the MIT Trope Tank, treasurer for the Berkley Cultural Council, an alumna of the MIT Media Lab, and adjunct faculty at Roger Williams University. See anjchang.com.
Leonardo Flores (“Social,” editorial collective member) is professor and chair of the English Department at Appalachian State University. He taught at the English Department at University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez from 1994 to 2019. He is President of the Electronic Literature Organization. He was the 2012-2013 Fulbright Scholar in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. His research areas are electronic literature and its preservation via criticism, documentation, and digital archives. He is the creator of a scholarly blogging project titled I ♥ E-Poetry, co-editor of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3, and has a Spanish language e-lit column in 80 Grados. He is currently co-editing the first Anthology of Latin American Electronic Literature. For more information on his current work, visit leonardoflores.net.
Katy Ilonka Gero (“WHALEFALL”) is a queer writer/scientist pursuing a PhD in computer science at Columbia University. She was a 2020 winter–spring Brooklyn Poets fellow and is currently a 2020–2021 CultureHub resident contributing writer. See katygero.com.
Mario Guzman (“Combinatory Nierika”) is a Mexican researcher, writer, and new media artist based in Argentina and Hong Kong. He has a BAs in Literature and a MA in Technology and Aesthetics of Electronic Arts. In his thesis, Interfaces and Writing Modes at the Intersection between Digital Literature and Electronic Arts, he merges writing with electromagnetic phenomena, algorithmic processes, and robotics. He is interested in bringing code studies, storytelling, and culture together by exploring the communication between human and non-human agents, robot-human interaction, and different ways to encode perception and narrative through machines and Artificial Intelligence. His work has been exhibited in Latin America, the USA, Europe, and Asia. See mario-guzman.com.
Judy Heflin (editorial collective member) is a writer, programmer, and researcher interested in the intersection of storytelling and technology. She has an SM in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and is currently a writer at the AI Foundation.
Julie Hsieh (“Around and Around”) is a web developer interested in UX, animation, and data visualization. She recently started working on a concept mapping system. Julie also enjoys teaching yoga, learning about the subtleties of posture, non-violent communications, and finding parallels in the world vs. the human body. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
Hannah Jenkins (“the horizon”) is an arts writer and poet specialising in digital platforms and online writing experiments. They are the assistant editor and poetry editor of Running Dog and sit on the board of Firstdraft as co-director and treasurer. Hannah graduated with a Master of Curating at Cultural Leadership (academic excellence) from the University of New South Wales Art & Design in 2019. You can find Hannah’s poetry, fiction, reviews, and more on their website. They tweet @Hiijenks.
Milton Läufer (“Isolation Soliloquies,” editorial collective member) is an Argentinian writer, journalist, and teacher who lives in Berlin. He has published articles and short stories in Esquire, Vice, Guernica, CIA Revista, and Otra Parte and has participated in art exhibitions in Latin America, the US, and Europe. He earned a creative writing MFA at NYU and is now doing a PhD there focused on digital literature in Latin America. He was the 2016–2017 writer-in-residence at The Trope Tank, at MIT. In 2015 he published Lagunas, a partially algorithmic-generated novel, online. His second computer generated novel, A Noise Such as a Man Might Make, was published in 2018 by Counterpath. See miltonlaufer.com.ar.
Mark C. Marino (“Pent-Up Pentagrams”) is a professor (teaching) of writing at the University of Southern California, where he directs the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab. His works include “a show of hands,” “Living Will,” and a collaboration with John T. Murray, Joellyn Rock, and Ken Joseph, entitled “Salt Immortal Sea.” He was one of ten co-authors of 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (MIT Press, 2013) and collaborated with Jessica Pressman and Jeremy Douglass on Reading Project: A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone’s Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} (University of Iowa Press, 2015). His latest book is Critical Code Studies (MIT Press, 2020).
Nick Montfort’s (“Quarters,” publisher) computer-generated books of poetry include #!, the collaboration 2×6, Autopia, The Truelist, and (forthcoming from NEW SIGHT in February) Golem. His digital projects include the collaborations The Deletionist and Sea and Spar Between. He was co-editor of The New Media Reader and The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1, and he currently edits the Using Electricity series for Counterpath. Montfort’s Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities, Second Edition will be published by the MIT Press in May. Montfort is professor of digital media at MIT and directs the Trope Tank there. He lives in New York. His site is nickm.com.
John T. Murray (“Pent-Up Pentagrams”) is an assistant professor of digital media at the University of Central Florida. He is a co-author of Flash: Building the Interactive Web (MIT Press, 2014) and Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider (Bloomsbury, 2020). His research focuses on interactive narratives and reality media (augmented, virtual, and mixed reality). His investigation includes both existing and future computational media platforms, including authoring tools and affordances and measuring and evaluating complex experiences created for them using emerging techniques such as eye-tracking, facial action units, machine learning, and physiological signals. See lucidbard.com.
Allison Parrish (“Throes”) is a computer programmer, poet, educator, and game designer whose teaching and practice address the unusual phenomena that blossom when language and computers meet. She is an assistant arts professor at NYU ITP/IMA and lives in Brooklyn. See decontextualize.com.
Leonardo Solaas (“The Spell”) studied philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires and is a self-taught programmer and new media artist. His work explores different critical approaches to software and technology and engages with self-organizing systems, rule-based processes, artificial life, social networks, data visualization, and many other topics. He also writes and teaches on subjects near the intersection between art, philosophy, and technology. He lives and works in Buenos Aires. See solaas.com.ar.
Yohanna Joseph Waliya (“Monde instable,” “Pope Lost Hope”) is a Nigerian digital poet, distant writer, novelist, playwright, and the winner of the Janusz Korczak Prize for Global South 2020. He is a graduate assistant at the University of Calabar and is studying for an MA in French at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria. He writes in French and English. Among his works are: La révolte de vie (a play), Monde 2.0 (a play), Hégémonie Disparue (a novel), Quand l’Afrique se lèvera (a novel), Homosalus (digital poetry), Momenta (digital poetry), “@TinyKorczak” (Twitterbot poetry), and Climatophosis (digital poetry). His research interests include distant writing, digital poetry, botification and datafication of twitterature, and language discourse. He is on Twitter as @Waliya_Y_Joseph. A full biography/bibliography is on ORCID.
Zach Whalen (“pent: house”) is an associate professor in the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication at the University of Mary Washington. He directs the minor in digital studies and teaches courses in Communication and Digital Studies, including courses on comics, electronic literature, transmedia fiction, and video games. His research is in video games and visual narrative. He also makes things like Twitter bots, and tools for making Twitter bots. See zachwhalen.net.
This page and the main page of Taper #5 are offered under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license so you can copy and share these two pages, and the whole issue, without modifications. (These pages are mainly informational; we do not want you to edit the author’s biographies, modify the open call for Taper #6, or change the way our authors and editors spell their names, for instance.) Each poem is offered individually under a short all-permissive free software license that appears in a comment at the top of each poem’s source code. That means you can use any or all of the poems however you like. You are free to study, modify, and share these poems, use them as the basis for projects of your own, and share your modified versions, among other things.
Taper #5 contents