Submissions for Issue #12

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 #12 invites submissions in response to the theme Tools. Faced with a problem, the human reaches for a tool: an adze to hollow a tree, a clock or a calendar to measure time, a spell checker to polish prose. We invite submitters to test how much usefulness can be packed into a minimalist digital tool; can the bloated software suites we all rely upon—photo editors, word processors, calendar apps—be effectively miniaturized? Submissions might also riff on other important examples of computational tools such as command-line utilities (e.g., wget, cat, and grep) or dubiously-helpful chatbots (e.g., Weizenbaum’s ELIZA and Colby’s PARRY). How might a small piece of software help the “end user” to think or sleep more deeply? How might it, as an instrument or palette, stimulate the player’s creativity? What tedious tasks should be automated? While we hope to receive some pieces that are unironically useful, we also welcome poems, artworks, games, and gadgets that ponder or make mischief with the very notion of tools and usefulness. We also welcome works that play with or engage the number 12 and its cultural and instrumental impact.

Submission Details

Timeline

Submissions for this issue will be accepted until February 1, 2024 at 11:59 PM AoE. Taper #12 will be published in Spring 2024. There will be no deadline extensions.

We invite rolling submissions from those interested in participating at tools@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.

José Aburto (“LODO”) is an experimental poet. His work is defined by his constant research into formats, supports, and writing methods that reinterpret poetic work from his own perspective: interactive, technological, and personal. You can find more of his work at joseAZ.pe.
Jim Andrews (“Elevate”) has been publishing vispo.com since 1996. It’s his life’s work. It’s a site of interactive, multimedia poetry and essays on language, art, and technology. He did a degree in English and studied three more years of math and computer science at UVic in Canada. He lives in Vancouver.
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 (“Flavor Frame”) 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 Trope Tank and the Berkley Cultural Council. See anjchang.com.
Paul Fagot (“No Parallel Maker”) is a design·writ·cod·er and student in Master Graphic [···] Languages at HEAR Strasbourg, France. His current master thesis "web, bug, hack, ux [···]" focuses on digital web writings as tactical practices of emancipation. You can join on Instagram: @paulft_.
Leonardo Flores (“Estranged,” “Mood Music”) 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.
Gustavo Gómez-Mejía (“11 x 11 semioscape”) is an associate professor of information and communication sciences at the University of Tours in France. His interests include digital cultures and semiology. He is a member of the Prim research team and part of the editorial board for Communication & Languages. He wrote Les Fabriques de soi (MkF, 2016) and co-authored Le Numérique comme écriture (A. Colin, 2019). Some of his digital literature and creative research works can be found on Glitch and Instagram (@gustavo.gomez.mejia").
Naoto Hieda (“Palallel”) is an artist from Japan working internationally for theater productions and in visual arts. In their artistic work, they question the productive qualities of coding and speculate on new forms, post-coding, through neuroqueerness, decolonization and live coding. naotohieda.com.
Chris Joseph (“ElƎ”, “We Rise”) 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.
anna y lin (“diaspora radicals”) is a Cantonese-American programmer, artist, reader, and knitter. Currently, her physical presence is in Brooklyn, and her online presence exists at annaylin.com or @iguannalin.
Connie Liu (“Returning Thoughts”) is a designer and aspiring creative technologist in NYC. She often thinks about temporality, digital identity, and low tech. She’s on a perpetual quest to understand how to build technology for social benefit, and has published research on tech for underserved communities. These days, she enjoys experimenting and making things—find more at connie.surf!
Mark C. Marino (“Hollywood Hitmaker”) teaches digital writing at the University of Southern California where he also directs the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab. He is the Director of Communication for the Electronic Literature Organization. Find more about him here: markcmarino.com.
Terhi Marttila (“Infinite Scroll”) is a Finnish artist and researcher who appropriates programming, language and voice to make things that meander at their crossroads. She is based in Portugal and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Interactive Technologies Institute (eGames lab). Her work has been published in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 4 The New River, nokturno.fi and raum.pt as well as at various academic conferences. See terhimarttila.com.
Nick Montfort (“Rotator,” publisher) currently edits the Using Electricity series for Counterpath and is co-editor of MIT Press’s Hardcopy series. With Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, he has edited Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023, which will be published in August 2024 by The MIT Press and Counterpath. Montfort is on the faculty of MIT and the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen. He directs the Trope Tank and lives in New York. His site is nickm.com.
Miaoye Que (“一一”)is a Chinese writer and cultural worker based in Brooklyn, NY. Currently at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, they are busy cultivating a practice that is seriously informed by their taste, whims and obsessions. One of Miaoye’s favorite love languages is receiving messages; leave them one on their guest book or X (formerly Twitter).
Carlota Salvador Megias (“This Bird Has Flown”) is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Bergen, Norway. She enjoys experimenting with philosophical method; exploring literature and poetry as especially giving spaces for philosophical investigation and performance; and taking (extremely) particular cases as her points of departure. Her dissertation asks what a self-consciously literary engagement with Søren Kierkegaard's moral psychology might contribute to philosophies of love, friendship, and intimacy. Find her elsewhere at incorrigibly.carrd.co.
Elle Smith (“HAIL”) Elle Smith is a student and IT professional studying English Writing, Rhetorics, and Technical Communication at Appalachian State University. She loves science fiction literature and punk rock. She enjoys studying film and philosophy, particularly horror and film noir, and how these genres intersect with the exploration of existentialism, metaphysics, and moral philosophy. Elle is continuing her journey as a graduate student, working to enhance her craft as a writer and communicator.
Helen Shewolfe Tseng (“Smoke Signals”) 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.
Lee Tusman (“Going The Distance”) is a new media artist and educator working in collectives and DIY communities creating art, tools and community projects. He works in code, collage, sound, and text to produce works for museums, galleries, artist-run spaces, websites, and virtual environments. Tusman is host of the podcast Artists and Hackers. He received a BA in sociology from Brandeis University and a MFA from UCLA Design Media Arts. He is assistant professor of new media and computer science at Purchase College and a member of Flux Factory art community in New York City. See leetusman.com.
Ted Warnell (“13 Parallels”) lives on the western edge of a great Canadian prairie. See warnell.com.
Zach Whalen (“Beauty and Grace”) is an associate professor at the University of Mary Washington where he teaches digital studies. Recently, that has included courses in creative coding, game studies, graphic novels, and electronic literature. He is the co-editor (with Chris Foss and Jonathan W. Gray) of Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives and (with Laurie N. Taylor) of Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games. As a practitioner of computational writing, Whalen has published tiny digital poems in Taper, several popular artistic and literary Twitter bots (all of which are currently defunct), and the graphic novel An Arthrogram. He is currently working on a scholarly monograph about computer-generated books. Visit zachwhalen.net for more information.
Christine Wilks (“Click To Confirm,” “Unparallel Processing” )is a writer, artist, developer of creative web apps and interactive digital narratives, and practice-based researcher. She recently released Voices, an interactive digital fiction for body image bibliotherapy, as part of Writing New Body Worlds, an international, transdisciplinary research project (funded by SSHRCC). Her digital fiction, Underbelly, won the New Media Writing Prize 2010 and the MaMSIE Digital Media Competition 2011. Her creative work is published in online journals, exhibitions and anthologies, including the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2 and the ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature, and has been presented internationally at festivals, exhibitions and conferences. She has a PhD in digital writing from Bath Spa University. See her work at crissxross.net.
David Thomas Henry Wright (“Wan Wan”) 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 masters (creative writing) from the University of Edinburgh, and taught creative writing at China’s top university, Tsinghua. He is currently associate professor at Nagoya University. See davidthomashenrywright.com.
This page and the main page of Taper #11 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 #12, 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 #11 contents