About Taper #10

Submissions for Issue #11

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+1^th issue to be included with the release of the N^th issue.

Taper #11 invites submissions in response to the theme “Parallels”. The number 11, especially when rendered in many sans-serif fonts, presents itself as two parallel lines, evoking a pair of chopsticks, a hallway in an ASCII game, symmetry, palindromes, and e. e. cummings’s poem “[l(a],” which explores the visual ambiguity of the letter l and the number 1. We encourage explorations of parallelism: not meeting, maintaining distance, parallelism in programming and processing, parallel universes and lives, twins, parallelograms, and so on. Taper exists in the space between programming and poetry, two areas that seemingly have parallel trajectories with minimal crossover, except in the world of digital poetry. We are also, as always, interested in allusions to the number 11, including the 11-year sunspot cycle, the character Eleven in Stranger Things, the volume dial in This is Spinal Tap, mystical references to the number as lucky, the number of players in games like soccer, football, cricket, and bandy, and even near-spellings of the word, as with Tolkien’s beloved Elven people.

Submission Details

Download our template in a zip file so that you can edit it. After you have it and have unzipped it, edit only two parts of the file: the long comment at the top, which will hold your title, your name, and a creative statement from you, and the very end of the file, where your tiny computational poem is to be placed.
All code (in the form of ES6, CSS, and HTML) must be placed between the template’s closing header tag (</header>) and the closing body tag (</body>), must be valid HTML5, and must fit within 2KB (2048 bytes).
Use the W3C validator to validate the page after you finish.
Submissions should not use any external libraries or APIs, nor link to any external resources, including fonts. This is so that pages will be self-contained following Taper’s vision. It also has the practical purpose of allowing all of Taper’s work to be viewed without a network connection, for instance, in a gallery setting.
Please refer to this About page for license terms under which all poems have been and will be released; by submitting to Taper #10, you agree that, if we accept your work, we may release it, copyright by you, under this same short all-permissive license. Since you are submitting the work to us in the provided template, this will be part of your submission.

Timeline

Submissions for this issue will be accepted until Sept. 17, 2023 at 11:59 PM AoE. Taper #11 will be published in Fall 2023. There will be no deadline extensions.

We invite submissions until then from those interested in participating at parallels@badquar.to. Simply attach your work in one zip file containing your HTML files (up to five per author will be considered). You should then receive an email acknowledging our receipt of your work within a few days.

Chris Arnold (“Tardy Student Punishment Simulator”) writes software and poetry from Whadjuk Noongar country in Boorloo (Perth), Western Australia. With David Thomas Henry Wright, Chris won the 2018 Queensland Literary Awards’ Digital Literature Prize and placed 2nd in the 2019 Robert Coover Award. He was shortlisted for Australian Book Review’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize in 2022 and 2023, and he completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Western Australia.

Kirill Azernyy (“Ten Index Fingers”) — writer, poet, literary scholar, amateur gamemaker. His spheres of interests include digital writing, gaming, contemporary poetry and performance, and the ontology and phenomenology of writing. He lives in Haifa, Israel and hosts the literary site (illitera.com).

Sotiri Bakagiannis (“Radio Gaga”) lives and works in South London. See thewhodidthis.com.

Kyle Booten is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. His poems written with the assistance or interference of algorithms have appeared in Lana Turner, Fence, Boston Review, Blackbox Manifold, and elsewhere. Salon des Fantômes, a book that documents a weeklong philosophical salon attended by himself and a coterie of AI-fabricated characters, is forthcoming from Inside the Castle. See kylebooten.me.

Angela Chang (“Winding Tale of Tens”) 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, the Berkley Cultural Council, and an alumna of the MIT Media Lab. See anjchang.com.

Liza Daly (“The Figure 10 in Gold”) is a software engineer whose creative computing projects center on engagement with prose and printed books. Currently she is a Technologist in Residence at the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard University. Her work has been featured in the Electronic Literature Collection volumes 3 and 4; the Workshop on the History of Expressive Systems at the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling; and Author Function, an exhibit at MIT Libraries. She has served as Vice-President of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation and co-chair of the W3C Digital Publishing Interest Group. See lizadaly.com.

A. Pedro Fernandes (“Graphing Paper”) writes: I have been writing software since I was 11 years old (1982), and memory was scarce back then, so this challenge was a travel to the past. I have a degree in Electrical Engineering and am specialized in mobile communications. I am a fan of visual representation of information. Computers are my work and my passion. @pfernandes@mastodon.social

Leonardo Flores (“Tentative”) is a hackeur and cyborg programmer, when he isn’t busy being an academic administrator, educator, editor, and scholar. Hecho en Puerto Rico. Learn more about his work in leonardoflores.net.

Katy Ilonka Gero is a writer and computer scientist. Her poems and essays can be found in the html review, Catapult, Stirring Lit, and more. She’s a postdoctoral fellow in computer science at Harvard University and was recently a poetry resident at Vermont Studio Center. You can find more of her work at katygero.com.

Claude Heiland-Allen (“Ten Dust Tree”) has been using and writing free/libre open source software for artistic purposes for two decades, inspired by maths and science. Online at https://mathr.co.uk, offline in London, UK.

Chris Joseph (“To Make Sense of Existence”) is a British/Canadian writer and artist who works primarily with electronic text, sound, and image. His past projects include the digital fiction series Inanimate Alice; Animalamina, a collection of interactive multimedia poetry for children; and The Breathing Wall, a novel that responds to the reader’s rate of breathing. See chrisjoseph.org.

Nabil Kashyap (“Universal Zoom”) is a writer and software engineer based in Los Angeles. He is the author of The Obvious Earth (Carville Annex, 2017), a collection of experimental essays on travel. Other work has appeared in Actually People, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Full Stop, Seneca Review, Versal, and elsewhere. See nabilk.com.

Nathan Mifsud (“Myriad”) is a writer based in Narrm/Melbourne. See mifsud.org.

Jason Nelson (“10+10=The Briefest Evidence”, “10+10=The Pain Bees”) is a creator of wondrous digital poems and fictions, builder of art games and all manner of digital art creatures. He is an associate professor of digital writing at the University of Bergen in Norway. Aside from coaxing his students into breaking, playing, and morphing their creativity with all manner of technologies, he exhibits widely in galleries and journals, with work featured around the globe at FILE, ACM, LEA, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, ELO, and dozens of other acronyms. There are awards to list (Paris Biennale Media Poetry Prize), organizational boards he frequents (Australia Council Literature Board and the Electronic Literature Organization), and fellowships; he’s adventured into a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Bergen, a Moore Fellowship at the National University of Ireland, and garnered numerous other accolades (Webby Award, Digital Writing Prize). See dpoetry.com and secrettechnology.com.

Allison Parrish (“Ten Thousand”) is a computer programmer, poet, 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’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. According to Ars Technica, Allison’s work “delight[s] everyone.” She was named “Best Maker of Poetry Bots” by the Village Voice in 2016, and her zine of computer-generated poems called Compasses received an honorary mention in the 2021 Prix Ars Electronica. Allison is the co-creator of the board game Rewordable (Clarkson Potter, 2017) and author of several books, including @Everyword: The Book (Instar, 2015) and Articulations (Counterpath, 2018). Her poetry has recently appeared in BOMB Magazine and Strange Horizons. Allison is originally from West Bountiful, Utah and currently lives in Brooklyn. See decontextualize.com.

Scott Rettberg (“Ten Lines”) is the director of the Center for Digital Narrative and a professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen.

Mark Sample (“One For Grundy”) is chair and professor of digital studies at Davidson College. His teaching and research focus on algorithmic culture, digital narrative, and creative coding. He is a co-author of 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (MIT Press), and his research has appeared in Debates in DH, Game Studies, and Digital Humanities Quarterly. His creative work, like The Infinite Catalog of Crushed Dreams, has been exhibited internationally, while his most recent work, such as Content Moderator Sim and 10 Lost Boys, uses the procedural rhetoric of video games to critique contemporary culture. He can be found online at samplereality.com.

Richard Snyder (“Rota Fortunae”) is assistant professor at Northwest University and associate director of the Electronic Literature Lab. When not teaching in English, communications, and creative media, he makes things in ink, paint, code, wood, and words. He may be glimpsed from time to time goofing around in various parts of western Washington State with his wife and three children. rdsnyder.com.

Daniel Temkin (“Every Integer Greater Than 1 Is 10”) is an artist and writer whose work examines the clash between systemic logic and human irrationality. It includes hand-rendered Dither Studies and a dialect of JS that allows porogrammers to misspelll everything. His blog esoteric.codes covers esolangs, code art, and other projects that challenge conventional notions of computing. It was the 2014 recipient of the ArtsWriters.org grant, developed in residence at the New Museum’s NEW INC incubator, and has been exhibited at ZKM. His work can be seen at danieltemkin.com.

Eugenio Tisselli practices programming as a form of writing, and writes poems following algorithmic procedures. He has published his work using different media formats, and has presented it at international festivals, talks, and exhibitions. He slowly uploads most of his pieces and texts to his website, motorhueso.net.

Helen Shewolfe Tseng (“X/十/10: Wheel of Fortune”) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, witch, naturalist, and creative coder based in San Francisco, California. For more signs of life, see shewolfe.co and @wolfchirp.

Andy Wallace (“Exponential Containment”) is an independent game designer and creative coder who lives in NYC. He is also a founding member of the non-profit Death By Audio Arcade collective. He likes to trick computers into making art. Website: andymakes.com, Twitter: @Andy_Makes, Mastodon: @andymakes.

Ted Warnell (“Ten Index Fingers”) lives on the western edge of a great Canadian prairie. See warnell.com.

Mark Wolff (“A Hundred Thousand Billion Color Combinations”) is a professor of French and Global Studies and the chair of the Modern Languages department at Hartwick College (Oneonta, New York, USA). His research explores the use of computational tools for natural language processing to generate literary texts. See markwolff.name.

David Thomas Henry Wright (“Tardy Student Punishment Simulator”) won the 2018 Queensland Literary Awards’ Digital Literature Prize, 2019 Robert Coover Award for a work of Electronic Literature (2nd prize), and 2021 Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award. He has been shortlisted for multiple other literary prizes, and published in various academic and creative journals. He is the recipient of a Queensland writing fellowship, an Australian Council for the Arts grant, and a JSPS Kakenhi grant. He has a PhD (comparative literature) from Murdoch University and a master’s (creative writing) from the University of Edinburgh, and taught creative writing at China’s top university, Tsinghua. He is currently co-editor of The Digital Review, a narrative consultant for Stanford University’s Smart Primer research project, and an associate professor at Nagoya University. See davidthomashenrywright.com.

Ivan Zhao (“ten as in sky”) (he/him) is a creative technologist and bread baker. He’s interested in the flexibility of the internet, the perception of time, and petting as many dogs as possible. Find more of his work at ivanzhao.me.

¡wénrán zhào! (“writing lines”) is an artist and programmer based in Providence, RI. Her work seeks to reimagine alternative ways to experience technologies, by exploring the hybridity of digital objects and physical materials—oftentimes, found objects and textiles. With code as a primary medium, she delves into themes such as “minimal computing,” “subversive instruments,” internet infrastructure, and machine learning technology in her research and art practices. She is currently an MFA candidate in Digital + Media at Rhode Island School of Design. You can explore her work on her website and digital writing blog. theunthoughts.com.