About Taper #13

Submissions for Issue #14

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.

For Taper #14, we invite submissions in response to the theme “Sonnets.” The sonnet has a rich history of constraint-based writing—in Italy with Petrarch, in England with Shakespeare, and in France with Queneau. We welcome works that engage with the sonnet form itself, with other constrained poetic and artistic forms (e.g. renga, ode, décima, alexandrine verse, ghazal), with generative or analog approaches inspired by Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes, or with reinterpretations of the sonnet’s etymology of “little song” through tiny audio pieces or multimedia experiments. We also welcome thematic explorations of the number 14, including the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the fortnight (or Fortnite), teenage transitions, the atomic number of silicon, and mathematical concepts like the first two decimal digits of pi.

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).
After completing your work, please use the W3C validator to check for warnings and errors. Identifying these errors is essential to ensure the piece functions correctly across different browsers and continues to work well over time. Features that are supported across browsers may be accepted even if they result in a warning, but there is value in getting work to validate. Although standard compression and minification can make the source code of many Taper works difficult to understand, we must establish limits on the code's complexity and (lack of) legibility. Consequently, we won’t publish pieces that use 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 follow the spirit of the constraints and avoid bypassing the size limit through techniques such as parsing the comment section to inject assets or content into the code. When in doubt, please reference prior issues and works to see what we have published in the past. This is also helpful when questions arise regarding use of the template.
Please refer to this About page for license terms under which all poems have been and will be released; by submitting to Taper #14, 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, February 14, 2025 at 11:59 PM AoE. Taper #14 will be published in Spring 2025. There will be no deadline extensions.

We invite rolling submissions from those interested in participating at sonnets@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 (“Fearsome Floors”, “Stevie 2”) 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 his PhD thesis appears on the Graduate Research School Dean's List at the University of Western Australia.

Arushi Bandi (she/her) (“Scripted Readings”) is a technologist based out of San Francisco, thinking about how we can shape the technology that shapes us. Her website is at arushibandi.com.

xtine burrough (“Witches’ Weed”) uses emerging technologies to engage networked audiences in critical participation. She is a professor at The University of Texas at Dallas where she directs LabSynthE, a laboratory for the creation of synthetic and electronic poetry. She has received commissions and grants from institutions such as The Photographers’ Gallery, London, The UK Big Lottery Fund, Nasher Sculpture Center, Puffin Foundation West, Ltd., Humanities Texas, and California Humanities. xtine is co-editor on a series of publications on remix studies with Eduardo Navas and Owen Gallagher. Online, she is missconceptions.net and @xtineburrough.

John Cayley (“Lucky For Some”) 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) His main site is programmatology.com and see nllf.net.

Angela Chang (“Cakepops”) 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.

Bunmi Davies ("Faxlore”) lives in London, has learned about computational poetry, and would like to learn more about it. Interests include: writing software, art on the web, science, critical theory, architecture, and cool things which may not immediately make a lot of sense. Website: bunmidavies.github.io

Kavi Duvvoori ("Maybe in the Next Colony, Province (or Territory)" ) 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, avoiding the enclosure of language itself, sauteing, and maps. See titleduntitled.name.

Leonardo Flores (“Crossed Readings”) is a 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.

Gustavo Gómez-Mejía (“¿Augurios o agüeros?”) 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 & Langages. He wrote Les Fabriques de soi (MkF, 2016) and co-authored Le Numérique comme écriture (A. Colin, 2019) among other publications. Some of his digital literature and creative research works can be found on Glitch and Instagram (@gustavo.gomez.mejia).

Vidya Giri (“better luck next time”) 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 (“Kind of a Witch”) can be described in less than two kilobytes.

Evan Hahn (“Light Switch”) is a computer programmer, technical author, and fan of black cats: evanhahn.com/

Joses Ho (“triskaidekaphilia”) is a poet, pro-wrestler and scientist. As tech sorcerer for SingPoWriMo, he archives and visualises the poetry posted. Joses also has interests in creative computing and generative text. His pamphlet Dogma was shortlisted for the inaugural Paper Jam series in 2021, and his manuscript Moving Downwards in a Straight Line was selected for Manuscript Bootcamp (organised by Sing Lit Station) in 2019. He is also a pro-wrestler and ring announcer with GrappleMax. See www.josesho.com/resume/.

Michael Hurtado (“Salvapoesía”) is a mathematician, technologist, new media artist, and poet. He is a professor in the Department of Architecture at Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas, a fellow of the FabLearn program at Columbia University, and co-director of Masmédulab: poetry and new media laboratory (@masdedulab). He received the VIDA16 award from Fundación Telefónica and the first edition of the Hub Musical Chile award. His poems have been published in the anthology Nós da Poesia Volume 08, I Mostra Virtual de Poesia Visual in Brazil, Bufo Magazine #2, and illitera.com. His electronic poems are part of collections such as the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 4 and the Cartografía Digital Latinoamericana.

Hannah Jenkins (“Your machine is a cloud chamber / cosmic ray seance”) is an arts writer and poet living on Wangal and Gadigal Country (Sydney, Australia). They are a co-founder of crawlspace.cool, a project to cultivate and platform artistic and poetic applications of technology. You can find more of their work at hannahjenkins.zone.

Isabel 玥 Li (“fetish”) is an artist, writer, and creative software researcher tinkering with queer nostalgia. They grew up on the beaches of Tāmaki Makaurau and now reside in San Francisco. See isabel.li, @ilyues.

Connie Liu (“Random Luck Generator”) is a designer and artist who often thinks about temporality, digital identity, and low tech. Currently, she's tinkering about making creative tools for connection and self-expression. You can find her comics, risographs, tiny websites, essays, and social links on connie.surf!

Jonah Lubin (“סגולה”) is trying to do something with (to?) Yiddish. For more, see iberz.org, jonahlubin.net.

Brendan Schuetze (“Tension Tap”) is an assistant professor in a field with no clear connection to his creative process. Based in Salt Lake City, his work explores the boundaries between inner monologue and outer existence. He is a member of the art collective Form without Function. See schu.etze.co.

Cristóbal Sciutto Rodríguez (“Telegraphically”) is a programmer and architect from the Americas, broadly, but based in São Paulo. He can be reached at cristobal.arquipelago.org.

Helen Shewolfe Tseng (“Coyote Spotting Simulator”) 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.

Dani Spinosa (“The Swift Sonnets”) is a poet, scholar, educator, writer, and a full-stack developer. She an adjunct professor, a software engineer, a co-founding editor of Gap Riot Press, the managing editor of the Electronic Literature Directory, and the author of two books, several chapbooks of poetry and several more peer-reviewed journal articles on poetry. She lives in beautiful Wasaga Beach, Ontario.

AnneMarie Torresen (“They Love Me, They Love Me Not”) is an artist whose work often includes writing, coding, or mathematics (that’s an inclusive “or”). Currently taking a gap year from an MFA program in Digital+Media at the Rhode Island School of Design, AnneMarie works at a small grocery store helping to support local farms and reduce food waste. Their website (like most things) is always a work in progress: atorresen.github.io/art.

Zach Whalen (“powers of belief”) 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 digital poems in Taper, created several artistic and literary Twitter bots (RIP), and regularly participates in NaNoGenMo. He is currently completing a scholarly monograph about computer-generated literary and artistic books. Visit zachwhalen.net for more information.

Christine Wilks (“Casting”, “Resisting”) is a writer, artist, developer of creative web apps and interactive digital narratives. Her recent work, Voices, an interactive digital fiction for body image bibliotherapy, was short-listed for the New Media Writing Prize 2023 in three categories, including the Chris Meade Memorial Main Prize. Her previous creative work has won awards and is published in online journals, exhibitions and anthologies, and has been presented internationally at festivals, exhibitions and conferences. She has a practice-based PhD in digital writing from Bath Spa University. See her work at crissxross.net.

David Thomas Henry Wright (“Fearsome Floors”) 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 the University of Bergen. See davidthomashenrywright.com.

XOX Labs (“Time Incongruities”) XOX Labs is your trusted partner in personal obsolescence. Let’s stay irrelevant together at xoxlabs.com.

Hamid Yuksel (“Evil Eyes”) is a creative technologist and frontend engineer based in Toronto. He enjoys working on multimedia projects involving a mix of visuals, writings, and interactives. He also gives a big shout-out to his two cats and growing collection of houseplants that annoy a certain someone they all love. See more at yooksel.com.