About Taper #2

Submissions for Issue #3

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 available in the Nth issue, just as the information about the third issue is available here.

Taper #3: Triptychs and Triads will be the next issue, exploring literary and numerical themes on the concept of threes. Taper melds the literary traditions of the Oulipo with the restrictions of computing systems to provide a fertile ground for creativity. For this issue, we invite literary self-contained computational pieces that explore "three" in diverse ways: e.g. cultural memes (superstitions, “three strikes you’re out”, “three’s company”, “three-peat”, “three is the magic number”, “three musketeers”, etc;), literary juxtaposition (triptych, triplets, tercets), and/or language constructions (trigrams, glyphs). Taper is interested in works that foreground the intersection of computation, literature, and text.

Submissions are to be placed in our template and are to be valid HTML5 including valid ES6, with all parts of the page after the header limited to 3KB. This means that with the unmodified template, the maximum size for a file is 6363 bytes. Please use the W3C validator to check your file. Submissions may not use any external libraries or APIs or link to any external resources, including fonts. Refer to our license information for the terms under which all poems have been and will be released; by submitting to Taper #3, you agree that, if we accept your work, we may release it, copyright by you, under this same short all-permissive license. We invite submissions from those interested in participating at triads@badquar.to by ~~February 18, 2019~~ (deadline extended to) March 1, 2019. Simply attach your work in the form of HTML files, and send up to three submissions.

six a. is an artist and organizer who lives and works in Montreal. You can find them online at @doam.

Sebastian Bartlett is an undergraduate studying computer science at MIT. He is an arcade game enthusiast who owns, maintains, and is currently studying vintage coin-operated games. He is developing online cross-platform computer games using the Löve2D framework, and has created educational tutorials and lectures on game development principles — see sebastianbartlett.com.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is the author of Personal Science (Tupelo Press), a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press), But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press), and Grand Dessein (Container). She teaches in the creative writing MFA at UMass Boston — see lillianyvonnebertram.com.

Kyle Booten is a postdoctoral fellow in the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College. His computationally-mediated poems have appeared or are forthcoming in venues such as Lana Turner, Fence, Boston Review (What Nature), and Western Humanities Review.

Angela Chang 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, treasurer-elect for the Berkley Cultural Council, an alumna of the MIT Media Lab and adjunct faculty at Emerson College — see anjchang.com.

Augusto Corvalan is a visual artist and writer living in Baltimore. More of his work can be found at deadalivemagazine.com.

Kavi Duvvoori is currently an MFA student in the Digital Arts and New Media program at UC Santa Cruz and a digital language artist working on a collection of language games in conversation with various formal models. They are interested in the play between structure and nonsense, and the positive semantic and human possibilities in positions or identities defined as negative spaces; their dream job is to join the OuLiPo, however they still don't know any French — see kavid.xyz/semiprof or a (rarely used) Twitter @KaviDuvvoori.

Esen Espinosa studied philosophy at the Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, earning a degree (bachiller and licenciatura) and also a three-year masters in systemic therapy, in Lima, in agreement with the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. Espinosa worked for four years as a philosophy teacher, assistant to the head of the department, and as a counselor and supervisor for the scholarship program students at the Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya. His passion for programming made him leave these two directions behind and he dedicated himself fully to programming. He started his company “Athelas” in 2012 in which he does web development. He also co-founded “Via codigo”, a social initiative whose objective is to provide youth from under-resourced and socially disadvantaged circumstances with the opportunity to become web developers. He loves teaching, learning and playing in between. Nowadays he lives and works in Lima, Peru — see @esen_espinosa.

Leonardo Flores is interim director and full professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico: Mayagüez Campus, and vice president of the Electronic Literature Organization. He was the 2012-2013 Fulbright scholar in digital culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. His research areas are electronic literature and its preservation via criticism, documentation, and digital archives. He is the creator of a scholarly blogging project titled I ♥ E-Poetry, co-editor of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3, and has a monthly e-lit column in 80 Grados. For more information on his current work, visit http://leonardoflores.net. His passion for e-lit and bots shines through in his Twitter account @Leonardo_UPRM. You can read, follow, and interact with the Twitter bots that inspired Tiny Protests/Protestitas here: @TinyProtests and @Protestitas.

Judy Heflin is a writer and researcher focusing on computational narrative intelligence and the literary aspects of new media. She graduated from Yonsei University in South Korea with a BA in comparative literature and cultures and a certificate in creative writing. At MIT, Judy works at The Trope Tank assisting with interactive fiction systems and computational narrative models.

Chris Joseph 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 and @cj391

Vinicius Marquet (MX, 1982) holds a BA in visual communication from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and an MA in creative design for digital culture from the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht (HKU) in The Netherlands. Today, he is a guest lecturer at KASK (Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium) in the Digital Storytelling Postgraduate Program and workshop facilitator for some other cultural institutions. Marquet developed Tell me a Secret (2013), a secret sharing workshop, where communities explore visual narratives through personal artifacts. He is also the author of diverse explorations such as Bandito e-zine (2006), Anacrón: Hipótesis de un producto Todo (2009) and Bucle: archivo de ficciones (2017). He also loves PDFs. See viniciusmarquet.com.

Stuart Moulthrop is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a member of the board of directors of the Electronic Literature Organization. He is the author of several notable projects in digital art and writing, including Victory Garden (1991), which Robert Coover called a “benchmark” for electronic fiction, and “Deep Surface” and “Under Language,” which in 2007 won Ciutat de Vinarós Prizes for narrative and poetry, respectively. In 2012 he and Professor Dene Grigar of Washington State University received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to begin Pathfinders, an ongoing effort to preserve the experience of early born-digital literature. Based on that research, Moulthrop and Grigar published Traversals: The Uses of Preservation for Early Electronic Literature (MIT Press, 2017).

Everest Pipkin is a drawing and software artist from Bee Caves, Texas, who produces intimate work with large datasets. They produce printed material as books and zines, as well as digital work in software, bots, and games. They also make drawings on paper. Pipkin holds a BFA from University of Texas at Austin, an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and has shown nationally and internationally at The Design Museum of London, The Texas Biennial, XXI Triennale of Milan, The Victoria & Albert Museum, and others. You can find them at everest-pipkin.com.

Mark Sample is an associate professor of digital studies at Davidson College, where he teaches and researches digital culture, interactive narratives, and creative coding. His creative work includes “Takei, George,” “House of Leaves of Grass”, and dozens of Twitter bots. He coauthored 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1));:GOTO 10 (MIT Press, 2013), which explores the intersection of home computing and programming in the 1980s. He can be found online at www.samplereality.com and on Twitter as @samplereality.

Rachel Paige Thompson earned her bachelor’s degree in social anthropology and comparative literature from Harvard University. Her honors thesis explored literature’s evolving role in the digital age through an ethnographic study of an online literary magazine. She also co-founded and directed the Harvard Organization for Prison Education and Reform, a network of eight volunteer groups that tutor in prisons across Massachusetts and work on advocacy initiatives relating to mass incarceration and education. Before joining CMS, Rachel worked in Boston-area art museums — the Harvard Art Museums and the Peabody Essex Museum — with a focus on developing teaching curriculum for makerspaces as well as integrated digital media experiences for visitors. At MIT Rachel is interested in interrogating the ethics of American incarceration media, from made-in-prison podcasts to exploitative reality television. She works as a research assistant in the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab under the direction of Lisa Parks. Rachel has a passion for retrieving the past; in her spare time, she works on restoring film cameras and mid-century modern furniture and really just wants to talk to someone about The Twilight Zone.

William Wu is a 4th year undergraduate at MIT studying Digital Media. William works with people, computation, and design thinking to make games, poems, MIDI controllers, and everything in between. See willy-vvu.github.io