Taper is an online literary journal for computational poetry and
literary art, to be published twice yearly by
Bad Quarto.
Each issue is edited by a collective. Contributions to the first issue
were not via an open call, but from people affiliated with The Trope Tank
at MIT, a laboratory directed by Bad Quarto proprietor Nick Montfort.
Taper is not officially assocated with MIT or hosted on an MIT
server, however.
The work in this first issue is written in valid HTML5, using ES6. It has
been tested across platforms on current-generation browsers, but all of
the pieces included will not work, for instance, on earlier browsers such
as Internet Explorer.
Submissions for Issue #2
Anyone is 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 available in the Nth issue, just as the information about the second
issue is available here.
Taper #2: Poems of Two will be the next issue, exploring literary and numerical
themes of the number 2. Taper melds the literary traditions of the Oulipo
with the restrictions of computing systems to provide a fertile ground
for creativity. For this issue, we invite self-contained computational
pieces that explore "two" in diverse ways: e.g. mathematical expression
(doubles, halves), juxtaposition (pairs, inverses), and/or language constructions
(bigrams, digrams). Submissions should use or easily be placed in our template (seen in each of the pieces in Taper
#1), be valid HTML5, and include ES6 so that all parts of the page after
the header fit within, this time, a 2KB or 2048 byte constraint. (Taper #1 had a smaller 1KB limit.) Submissions should not use any
external libraries or APIs or link to any external resources, including fonts.
Refer to the about page in the first issue for
license terms under which all poems have been and will be released; by submitting to
Taper #2, you
agree that, if we accept your work, we may release it, copyright by you,
under this same short all-permissive license. We invite submissions from
those interested in participating at
rauqdab@owtfosmeop.to by September 1, 2018. Simply attach your work in the
form of HTML files, and send up to five submissions.
Sincerely,
The editorial collective of Taper #2:
Sebastian Bartlett, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Angela Chang, Kaelan Clare
Doyle Myerscough, Rachel Paige Thompson
Issue #1 Authors
Sebastian Bartlett is an undergraduate studying computer science
at MIT. He is an arcade game enthusiast who owns, maintains, and is currently
studying vintage coin-operated games. He is developing online cross-platform
computer games using the Löve2D framework, and has created educational
tutorials and lectures on game development principles — see
sebastianbartlett.com.
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is the author of
Personal Science (Tupelo
Press),
a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press),
But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press), and
Grand Dessein (Container). She teaches in the creative writing MFA
at UMass Boston — see
lillianyvonnebertram.com.
Angela Chang 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 is a member of the MIT Trope Tank, the Berkley Cultural Council, and
Emerson College — see
anjchang.com.
Milton Läufer is an Argentinian writer, journalist and teacher who
lives in Brooklyn. He has published articles and short stories in
Esquire, Vice,
Guernica, CIA Revista, and
Otra Parte, and 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, will
be published in 2018 by Counterpath — see
miltonlaufer.com.ar.
Nick Montfort’s books of poetry include
The Truelist (Counterpath);
Sliders (Bad Quarto);
Autopia (Troll Thread); with collaborators,
2x6 (Les Figues);
#! (Counterpath), and
Riddle & Bind (Spineless Books). He lives in New York and Boston, teaches at MIT, edits
the Counterpath series of computer-generated books Using Electricity, and
has completed more than fifty individual and collaborative digital projects
of different sorts — see
nickm.com.
Pierre Tchetgen a.k.a. kwe is a poet, designer of digital media learning
technologies, and co-author of
The Wellness Guide, a DIY multimedia
zine published by Word. Sound. Life. As a PhD candidate in the Graduate
School of Education (UC Berkeley) and visiting scholar in the Trope Tank
at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing, his research focus is on understanding
what affordances African talking drums and drum languages can contribute
to children’s early literacy and social-emotional development, especially
when mediated via embodied learning technologies. “Alpha Riddims” is his
first digital drum poem — see
wordsoundlife.org.
This page and the main page of Taper #1 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
#1, 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.