Taper is an online literary journal for computational poetry and
literary art, which has been published twice yearly by
Bad Quarto. The upcoming #4 will be the only issue for Fall 2019 and Spring 2020.
Each issue is edited by a collective. Editing and production is done
in coordination with The Trope Tank at MIT, a laboratory directed by Bad Quarto proprietor and publisher Nick Montfort. Taper is not
officially assocated with MIT or hosted on an MIT server, however.
The work in this third issue is written in HTML5, using ES6. It has
been tested across platforms on current-generation browsers, but all of
the pieces included may not work, for instance, on earlier browsers such
as Internet Explorer.
Submissions for Issue #4
Our next issue will be an extended issue.
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 included with the release of the Nth issue.
Taper #4: A New Trope will be the next issue, showcasing computational pieces exploring the concept of metaphors, archetypes, perspectives, and paradigm shifts. Taper melds the literary traditions of the Oulipo with the restrictions of computing systems to provide a fertile ground for creativity. Our vision is to showcase short web-based programs at the crossroads of computation, literature, text, and art. These programs embody artistic and poetic elements, and may take the form of interactive software, concrete poems, visual media, digital poetry, etc. We believe constraints provide a fruitful basis for creativity, and that short, free-open-source programs invite tinkering and exploration in ways that longer code bases do not.
Submission Details
- Place submissions in our template (seen in each of the pieces in Taper #1–3, link here).
- All added code (in the form of ES6, CSS, and HTML) must be implemented after the template’s closing header tag and must be valid HTML5; everything after the header tag must fit within 2KB (2048 bytes).
- Please use the W3C validator to validate your code.
- 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.
- Internal resources (attached pictures and audio) may be used as part of the poem, but will count towards the 2KB poem limit.
- The template header (including CSS and JavaScript) should not be modified aside from the title, author name, and author creative statement to be filled in prior to the initial style tag.
- Please refer to this About page for license terms under which all poems have been and will be released; by submitting to Taper #4, you agree that, if we accept your work, we may release it, copyright by you, under this same short all-permissive license.
Timeline
Submissions will be accepted from Nov 24, 2019 at 11:59 PM EST until Jan 10, 2020 at 11:59 PM EST. The editorial collective will review works and reach out to authors during the month of February. Taper #4 will be published mid April.
We invite submissions from those interested in participating at anewtrope@badquar.to. Simply attach your work in one zip file containing your HTML pages (up to five poems per author will be considered). This email address will not be active until the reading period begins.
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 —
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). They direct the creative writing MFA at UMass Boston — see
lillianyvonnebertram.com.
Kit Buckley is an artist living in Chattanooga, TN. He is currently interested in printmaking, papier mache, and gardens. He is a member of CHA Art/Dev, an art and tech collective in Chattanooga, and has previously had writing in
Open Review Quarterly. His webpage is
webpage.horse.
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 and Roger Williams University — see
anjchang.com.
Ross Goodwin is an artist, creative technologist, hacker, gonzo data scientist, and former White House ghostwriter. He employs machine learning, natural language processing, and other computational tools to realize new forms and interfaces for written language. From word.camera, a camera that expressively narrates its photographs in real time using artificial neural networks, to Sunspring (with Oscar Sharp, starring Thomas Middleditch), the world's first film created from an AI-written screenplay; from making London’s Trafalgar Square lions roar poetry (“Please Feed The Lions” with Es Devlin), to writing a novel with a car (
1 the Road), Goodwin’s projects and collaborations have earned international acclaim. Winner of the 2018 IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling, he earned his undergraduate degree in economics from MIT in 2009, and his graduate degree from NYU ITP in May 2016. //
rossgoodwin.com // twitter:
@rossgoodwin // instagram:
@ross.good.win
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. See
judyannheflin.com.
Will Luers is digital media artist and writer living in Portland, Oregon. In the Creative Media & Digital Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver, he teaches multimedia authoring, creative programming, digital storytelling and digital cinema. His art has been exhibited internationally and selected for various festivals and conferences, including the Electronic Literature Organization, FILE (Brazil) and ISEA. The generative e-lit work
novelling, a collaboration with Hazel Smith and Roger Dean, won the 2018 Robert Coover Award for Electronic Literature.
http://will-luers.com Twitter:
@wluers.
Logan K. Young's I(<3)U!: A Factorial Chapbook is out now via T(W)E(L)V(E)! BOOKS. A summer student of Thurston Moore at Naropa’s Kerouac School, he’s since been published everywhere from
Jacket2 to
Industrial Worker to
On-line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences and anthologized as far flung as
Erase the Patriarchy (University of Hell Press),
Emergency Index, Vol. 7 (Ugly Duckling Presse) and the forthcoming second edition of
Tonebook (Inpatient Press). Twitter:
@logankyoung
This page and the main page of
Taper #3 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
#4, 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.