Taper #11

While we hope each issue of Taper is unparalleled, this one calls attention to parallels, so note that from the beginning, every selection has been computational, offered to you as free software, and brought to you by a collective. In this issue, our authors have represented a rain of the same word and a hail of different phrases, quite appropriate as each falls from the sky at the same angle. The reduplication of a dog’s barking and of “One” in a film title are starting points for other work. Some things are parallel and some askew in two multilingual works, one with an anxious, monochrome grid, the other with zooming, colorful, underlined phrases.

There are generated texts that include serious conversation with one’s self, a distracted, emotional dialogue and writers’ room musings about (banal) movie ideas. In some of the more spare, and stunning, works, experience a gradient ascent and find what’s parallel in the two digits of this issue number. Text is produced in a Pong-like stadium and on the road, as if racing through a motorcycle game. Two towers of hopeful text rise while writing takes its place elsewhere in other pieces: in side-by-side paragraphs that assemble themselves surprisingly and in a heap of French headlines.

Some of the more representational images here are of a reflected (and reflective) city, the incense you can use to offer up your words, and a juicy hamburger. One scroller here is finite and presents a lateral text-machine, while the other goes on and on, taxing laboring fingers. One contributor has given us two takes on the café wall illusion, one with parallel texts that can be revealed, the other using dynamic pairs of characters. The individual symbols here range greatly in their complexity and accessibility, too, from musical, expressive emoji that you can move to an interactive worksheet of characters, each one conflating the Chinese writing system and the Latin alphabet.