About Taper #12

Submissions for Issue #13

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 #13 invites submissions in response to the theme “Superstitions.” The number 13 has long been aligned with luck (both good and bad), as well as with the feminine and supernatural. We welcome works inspired by these and other references to triskaidekaphobia (or -philia), including but not limited to: the rondeau poetic form, Friday the 13th, baker’s dozens, missing floors, coming of age, the number of lunar and menstrual cycles in a year, the number of witches in a coven, the number of Last Supper guests, the 13 British colonies, the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the Apollo 13 mission, and the pop star Taylor Swift, who uses the number 13 as an Easter egg throughout her work. We also welcome works that engage with superstitions in programming, as well as mathematical aspects of the number 13, e.g. as a twin/cousin/Wilson prime, emirp, Fibonacci number, or in relation to honeycombs, stars, and tessellations.

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. Even though standard forms of compression and minification make many of the works in Taper hard to understand, we need to set limits on how cryptic the source code is, so we will not publish pieces using exec or regex eval functions.
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 #13, 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 Friday, September 13, 2024 at 11:59 PM AoE. Taper #13 will be published in Fall 2024. There will be no deadline extensions.

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

Todd Anderson (“Long Way Down”) is a digital poet, software artist, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY and online. He is a co-director of the School for Poetic Computation where he also teaches courses about websites and computer viruses. He is perhaps best known as the host and curator of WordHack, the monthly language+technology talk series every third Thursday at Wonderville in New York City. See toddwords.com.

Javier Arce (“Type Simulator”) is a digital designer, creative developer, and illustrator. He is (still) enthusiastic about the World Wide Web and its endless potential for creativity and self-expression. His computer is permanently connected to the Internet and can be accessed at javier.computer.

Chris Arnold (“a dozen ways of reading 乳と卵,” “This is Coal”) writes software and poetry from Whadjuk Noongar country in 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 2022 Peter Porter Poetry Prize, and is completing a PhD in Creative Writing at The University of Western Australia.

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

Kyle Booten (“FloraNote,” “Yearlong Meditation App”) is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. His most recent work is Salon des Fantômes, a book that documents a weeklong philosophical salon attended by himself and a coterie of AI-fabricated interlocutors (Inside the Castle 2024). See kylebooten.me.

John Cayley (“Tool For Tapered Airs”) is a maker and theorist of language art in programmable media, and Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University. Grammalepsy (2018), Image Generation: Augmented and reconfigured (2023).
programmatology.com
nllf.net.

Angela Chang (“Milk Bread,” “Milk”) 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, the People's Republic of Interactive Fiction, and the Berkley Cultural Council. See anjchang.com.

Maggie Chang (“Shifting Times”) is a creative technologist, artist, and designer currently based in New York, with ties to Vancouver and Wuhan. She is always trying to gain a fuller understanding of the tools and interfaces we use, and enjoys engaging with technology beyond its typical function through the lens of metaphors and speculative design. You can find parts of her at maggiechang.space.

Spencer Chang (“minute faces”) is an artist, designer, technologist stewarding space for computing forms as a medium for human connection, expression, and creation. Their multimedia environments (websites, installations) and infrastructure (tools, systems) not only question what computers are and who we can be through them but also equip people with the means to make their own technology narratives. Spencer's work has been shown in Amsterdam, CultureHub in New York, and the de Young Museum in San Francisco, and featured in Frieze and MIT Technology Review. You can discover more about them in their internet home spencerchang.me.

Matthew DeMarco (“Morning as Embodiment”) (he/they) lives in Denver. His work has appeared on Poets.org and in Sporklet, Glass, McNeese Review, Okay Donkey, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. Previous collaborations with Faizan Syed have been anthologized in They Said (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). In his spare time, he edits youth poetry for a local nonprofit and tweets sporadically from @M_DeMarco_Words.

A. Dorsk (“Memento Hori”) lives in Massachusetts and sometimes writes quirky code that does quirky things.

Kavi Duvvoori is a writer and graduate worker in UWaterloo, on the Haldimand tract. Their interests include experimental and constrained literature, birds, borders, speculative fiction, lists, linguistics, the limits of language, math, queer failure, worldbuilding, the rejection of hierarchy and domination, sauteing, maps, and the avoidance of the enclosure of language itself. Works linked from titleduntitled.name.

Daniel Elfanbaum (“Filters”) is a writer from St. Louis who now lives in the Boston area. He usually does prose but likes writing code very much also. He can be found on Bluesky @delfanbaum.bsky.social and he has a website at bikesbooksandbullshit.com.

Leonardo Flores (“Thought Clock”) 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.

Vidya Giri (“flipscii”) is an artist, designer, and engineer from Houston, TX. Her art is reflective of her background: balanced between cultures, environments, and disciplines. Her current explorations revolve around collecting from one's surroundings as a form of reflection and the parallels between natural and human-made identities and the environments they encompass. More of her works and experiments are on her website: vidyagiri.com.

Jim Gouldstone (“flinty disregard”) can be described in less than two kilobytes.

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

Kate Hollenbach (“Morning as Embodiment”) (she/they) is an artist and educator based in Denver, Colorado. She creates video and interactive works examining critical issues in user interface and user experience design. Kate is an Assistant Professor of Emergent Digital Practices at University of Denver and serves on the Board of Directors for the Processing Foundation. You can see more of her work at katehollenbach.com.

Chris Joseph (“ChitGPT”) 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.

Jackie Liu (“To-Do”) (she/her) is an artist and digital designer who makes playful, narrative work–usually about her own life, and often somewhere in the middle of websites, interface design, comics, and games. She is interested in remembering and reimagining obsolete media as a way to experiment with new modes for relating with ourselves, others, and technology. Find her at jackieis.online.

Nick Montfort (“Gram’s Fairy Tales”) currently edits the Using Electricity series for Counterpath and is co-editor of MIT Press’s Hardcopy series. With Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, he edited Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023, which will be published in later in 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.

Agustin Rosa (“Extremely Constrained Notepad”) is a writer, editor, curator and sculptor from Rosario, Argentina currently living in Baltimore, Maryland. They are the editor-in-chief of Dead Alive Press, which explores the intersection of tech and publishing as well as one of the founders of Sleepwalker Collective, a DIY curation space serving local artists. They are an alumni of School for Poetic Computation and have earned a B.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia University and an M.F.A. in Studio Art at Maryland Institute College of Art. More at titorosa.com.

Helen Shewolfe Tseng (“FLUXIIS”) 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 (“The Loam Speaks Through Its Messenger,” “Progress is Made”) is an independent game designer and creative coder who lives in NYC. He is also a founding member of the non-profit Arcade Commons collective and the EMMA Technology Cooperative. He likes to trick computers into making art. His websites: andymakes.com, mastodon: @andymakes.

Ted Warnell (“Moons of Jupiter 12 redux”) lives on the western edge of a great Canadian prairie. See warnell.com.

Mark Wolff (“Mathews's Algorithm”) 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 (“a dozen ways of reading 乳と卵,” “This is Coal”) 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 associate professor at Nagoya University. See davidthomashenrywright.com.

Roopa Vasudevan (“At His Own Game”) is a South Asian-American new media artist and researcher. She uses conceptual engagement with labor, time, and critical self-reflection to make work about the things we take for granted in our everyday interactions with technology. She is an alum of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU; holds a PhD in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania; and is an assistant professor in the Department of Art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is a proud member of the Massachusetts Society of Professors (the labor union representing UMass faculty and librarians). Find her online at roopavasudevan.com.

Katherine Yang (“What’s in My Bag”) is an artist, programmer, and crafter. Her work explores existing and imagined ways in which code serves as a mirror to our intricate rituals. You can find her in her pixel paper home at kayserifserif.place.