About Taper #15

Submissions for Issue #16

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 #16, we invite submissions in response to the theme “For Good Measure.” The number 16 is an instrumental base for many standards and measures. The hexadecimal or hex (16 digit) number system underpins binary encodings on the web, including in the 16² web-safe colors and UTF-16 character encodings. Sixteen bars measure the space to spit a verse; Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven takes flight in octameter, or 16-syllable lines. The 16 pieces on each side of the chess board, governed by a rigid ruleset, allow for vast permutations of gameplay. Labor movements around the world have long fought to take measures toward a balanced 16-hour waking life: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what you will.” The 16 ounces in a pint and a pound invoke translations between historic Imperial measurements and the metric systems of Napoleonic rationalization. With them, cooks, bakers, and brewers may scoop, weigh, and calculate ingredients to the decimal point, but also sharpen artisanal intuitions beyond measure. We welcome poetic explorations with(in) systems of quantification, and engagements with how such structures make way for emergence and freedoms outside their lines.

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. (An exception is made for using <style> tags within your poem code; please do not modify the template's stylesheet.)
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.
While Taper has prioritized desktop display and interaction, please also check that your work is reasonably viewable on mobile and narrower screen widths.
Please refer to this About page for license terms under which all poems have been and will be released; by submitting to Taper #16, 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 February 2 at 11:59 PM AoE. Taper #16 will be published in Spring 2026. There will be no deadline extensions.

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

ANNAOTO (“A Swan Couple Dives for Dinner”) is a collaboration between Anna Brynskov and Naoto Hieda.

Anna Brynskov is a Danish researcher and filmmaker doing a PhD in Interaction Design and HCI at the IT University of Copenhagen. Her research is about inventing critical yet joy-spreading design approaches to digital futures of sexuality. She studies intimacy, feelings, bodies, and social relations through queer, crip, and glitch feminist lenses with various materials of expression and on various channels of communication. She holds a BA degree in Comparative Literature and an MA degree in Digital Design (Information Technology) from Aarhus University. She graduated from the film schools Potemkin Film College and Station Next Aarhus where she specialized as film director, and she studied electronic music composition at Engelsholm Højskole. See more at annabrynskov.com.

Naoto Hieda is a full-stack net artist from Japan based in Estonia enrolled in the PhD programme at the School of Digital Technologies, Tallinn University. With a background in engineering (BEng at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan and MEng at McGill University, Canada), Naoto completed Diplom II (master's equivalent) with distinction from the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany and works internationally for theater productions and in the 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. See more at naotohieda.com.

Chris Arnold (“Cross Country”) 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.

Wayne Brinson (“Seams”) is a tinkerer who finds bugs for a living. In his free time he tries to write functional code and share algorithmic art.

john domenico calvelli (“sashiko”) is an experimental maker of digital things, and a teacher of those who want to do similarly. He currently is an assistant professor in game design and development at Long Island University, and runs his own studio called pklwrks LLC. It’s named as such because his mom called him pickle growing up. He can be found at vel.quest, tilde.town/~vel, and pklwrks.dev.

Angela Chang (“Hot Cross Buns”, “The White Round Bao”) 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, the Friends of Dighton Rock Museum, and an alumna of the MIT Media Lab. See anjchang.com.

Chacal Cósmico (“Personae”) nests in a secret location in the northeast side of América, cultivating his personae.

Kavi Duvvoori (“Properties and Methods”) 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 (“Encounters”) is a cyborg creative coder, academic administrator, educator, editor, and scholar. Hecho en Puerto Rico. Learn more about his work in leonardoflores.net.

Claude Heiland-Allen (“Tarn Generative Map Algorithm #1”) has been using and writing free/libre open source software for artistic purposes for over two decades, inspired by maths and science. Online at mathr.co.uk, offline in Alt Empordà.

Chris Joseph (“It’s a Wonderful Life”) 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.

Warren C. Longmire (“Witness”) is a poet, educator, and technologist based in Philadelphia. His work merges UX design, language, and interaction to examine shifting social relationships and the poetics of systems. A software engineer and a longtime organizer in spoken word communities, his poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2021, American Poetry Review, and The Offing. He is currently completing his MFA in Poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. More at alongmirewriter.com.

Jonah Lubin (“Quincunx II”) is a PhD student in CompLit at Harvard.

Lewis Millholland (“Blue Blaze”) is a writer, journalist, and video game developer. His fiction and essays have appeared in journals including Passages North and DIAGRAM. His work has been supported by the Sun Valley Writer’s Conference and currently he is a third-year MFA student at Boise State University, where he serves as the associate editor of The Idaho Review and lives with a stolen (rescued) jade plant.

Jen Nesbitt (“eats, shoots n leaves 2k25”) is a writer, coder, and visual tinkerer exploring the intersection of language, memory, and machine. Her work often takes the form of browser-based poems, generative art, and creative tools that invite interaction and random chance. She builds collaborative experiences that blur the line between text and code, emotion and logic, seeking beauty in systems and glitches alike.

Agustin Rosa is an artist, writer and editor from Rosario, Argentina. His work explores speculative storytelling, digital interfaces as well as traditional book- and object-making techniques. He is the editor-in-chief of Dead Alive Press, a press and online space that serves as a platform for experimental artists working at the intersection of technology and storytelling. He is one of the founders of Sleepwalker Collective, a DIY curation space serving local Baltimore artists. He is an alumni of School for Poetic Computation and has earned a BA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and an MFA in Studio Art at Maryland Institute College of Art. He is currently based in Baltimore, Maryland. You can see more work at rosa-studio.com.

Mark Sample (“Sonnet 15”, “You Are Corrupted”) is a Professor of Film, Media, and Digital Studies at Davidson College. His teaching and research focuses on algorithmic culture, digital narrative, and interactive design, while his creative work, like Content Moderator Sim and 10 Lost Boys, harnesses the expressive power of computation in order to critique contemporary life. No Time to Discourse, his most recent digital project, is a speculative atlas of future climate disaster.

Harshit Singh (“Eyes”) is a Master of Science student in Digital Humanities at the Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur. His research and creative practice explore the intersections of narrative studies, technology, and interactive digital narratives including video games.

Irish Tee-Sy (“Sentimental Dilemma”) is an internet artist and designer based in San Francisco. She defines technology as an extension of human creativity and explores it as a soft medium for poetry. She would rather be a cyborg than a goddess, an echo of Donna Haraway's 1985 “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Find her at iteesy.xyz.

AnneMarie Torresen (“The Crossing Paths of Letters”) was a kid in Washington, DC, a mathematician in Michigan, a teacher in Texas, and is now a combination of these pursuing an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. You can see some of their work at atorresen.github.io/art.

Helen Shewolfe Tseng (“Of Mountains and Seas”) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, wildlife naturalist, and occasional code poet based in San Francisco, California. For more signs of life, see shewolfe.co and @wolfchirp.

Yohanna Joseph Waliya (“Fading World”) is a Nigerian digital poet, novelist, playwright, and scholar in French literature, electronic literature, and digital humanities. He holds an MA in French Literature from the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria, specialising in Twitterature and Twitterbot poetry. He is a Janusz Korczak Prize laureate, Electronic Literature Organization Research Fellow, HASTAC Fellow and he curates MAELD and ADELD, initiatives honoured by the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute. As Executive Director of AELA & ADELI, Waliya advances African electronic literature, teaches French literature at the Nigeria French Language Village, Nigeria. He is a doctorate researcher at the University of Lagos. Waliya authored La Récolte de vie, Monde 2.0, Climatophosis, and many others.

Andy Wallace (“Burning the Candle at Both Ends”) 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.

Christine Wilks (“Hopewards”) is a writer, artist, coder and developer of creative web apps and interactive digital narratives. In recent years, she has specialised in creating digital fictions for international, transdisciplinary, feminist research projects. Her personal creative work has won awards, been published in online journals, exhibitions and anthologies, and presented internationally at festivals, exhibitions and conferences. She has a PhD in digital writing from Bath Spa University. See her work at crissxross.net.

Nanette Wylde (“Redlined 2025”) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer tending creative community and gardens in the San Francisco Bay Area where she has made home since age seven. Wylde’s interests include: language, personality, difference, beliefs, systems, ideas, movement, reflection, identity, perceptions, structures, stories, socialization, definitions, context, memory, experience, the natural world, change, and residue. You can find her at preneo.org.

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