About Taper #6

Submissions for Issue #7

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 #7 we invite submissions in response to the theme Wonders. This issue is inspired by wonders big and small, at the scales of the seven wonders of the world and of the smaller, more personal ones that we keep close to us—from the curios nestled neatly in a Wunderkammer to the bric-a-brac that clutters a work-from-home office. After the doldrums and confinement of the past year, we seek works that reignite the imagination, arouse curiosity, and invite speculation.

In keeping with the tradition of thematically referencing the issue number we also invite works that address concepts related to the number seven, such as luck, perfection, the week, the day of rest, the seven virtues and/or deadly sins, the seven seas, or the colors of the rainbow. Alternatively, works could address abstract aspects of the number seven, such as its relations to geometrical figures or poetic forms.

Submission Details

Download our template in a zipfile 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 ensure the validity of your page.
Submissions may 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 work without a network connection, for instance in a gallery setting.
We use this style guide to edit Taper. The more you can adhere to it in providing us poems and creative statements, the easier it will be to edit and produce the issue.
Please refer to this About page for license terms under which all poems have been and will be released; by submitting to Taper #7, 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 and Process

Deadline extended: Submissions for this issue will be accepted until ~~August 31, 2021~~ September 15, 2021 at 11:59 PM AoE, that is, as long as it is September 15 anywhere in the world. Taper #7 will be published in Fall 2021.

Those interested in submitting work should send submissions to wonders@badquar.to. Simply attach your work in one zip file containing your HTML page 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 (“The impossibility of an ending in the mind of a compulsive gambler”) is failing to be an ex-software engineer while doing a creative writing PhD at the University of Western Australia, working with information security practices to develop a creative project in electronic literature. Chris works as Westerly’s Web editor, an opportunity for which he’s viciously grateful, so he thinks everyone should subscribe. He avoids having a Web presence wherever possible. Instead, you can usually find him in Perth, Western Australia.

Kyle Booten is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. His most recent work is To Pray Without Ceasing, a Web app that automates prayer. His computationally-mediated verse has recently appeared in Lana Turner, Fence, and Denver Quarterly. See kylebooten.me.

xtine burrough (“Six Feet Apart or Under: Throw the Die Together”) uses emerging technologies to engage networked audiences in critical participation. She is a professor and Area Head of Design + Creative Practice at The University of Texas at Dallas where she directs LabSynthE, a laboratory for the creation of synthetic and electronic poetry. Her works include A Kitchen of One’s Own, Epic Hand Washing in a Time of Lost Narratives, and The Laboring Self with Sabrina Starnaman. 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 on Instagram @xtineburrough.

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 for the Berkley Cultural Council, an alumna of the MIT Media Lab, and adjunct faculty at Roger Williams University. See anjchang.com.

A. Dorsk (“356 Trillion Haikus”) lives in Cambridge, MA and sometimes writes code that does quirky things.

Leonardo Flores is professor and chair of the English Department at Appalachian State University. He taught at the English Department at University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez from 1994 to 2019. He is 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 Spanish language e-lit column in 80 Grados. He has recently co-edited the first anthology of Latin American electronic literature. For more information on his current work, visit leonardoflores.net.

Judy Heflin is a writer, programmer, and researcher interested in the intersection of storytelling and technology.

Gustavo Gomez-Mejia (“Randomime (Hasard 2)”) 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). Some of his digital works can be found on Glitch. He occasionally tweets @G_GomezMejia.

Rory Green (“UP”) is a writer and digital media artist living on unceded Gadigal land. Their ongoing newsletter, Otherwise Pokedex, aims to publish a poem for every Pokemon. Find them on Twitter @rorydoinstuff or see rory.green.

Naoto Hieda (“Six Small Sketches”) is an artist from Japan, based in Cologne with a background in engineering (B.Eng. from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan and M.Eng. from McGill University, Canada) and currently enrolled in Diplom II at Kunsthochschule für Medien. They question the productive aspect of coding to speculate its new form, namely post-coding, through neurodiversity and live-coding. naotohieda.com.

Michael Hurtado (“Le livre”) is a Peruvian mathematician, technologist, poet and new media artist. He is a professor in the Department of Architecture at the Universidad de Ciencias Aplicadas in Perú, co-director in Masmédulab: laboratory of poetry and new media (@masmedulab) and FabLearn fellow hosted at Columbia University. He has received the VIDA16 award from Fundación Telefónica in the category of production incentives for art and artificial life projects in Spain. In 2020 he won the first edition of Hub Musical Chile in the category of immersive experiences with the virtual reality project MVX0. He is on Instagram as @michaelmobius.

Jim Kang (“Reconstructing the ‘Die’”) is an artist and software engineer who lives in Massachusetts. He likes to see human imagination fill in gaps left by either machines or other humans. He also likes to see people cross gaps in conceptual and factual understanding. Toward these ends, he makes automated art, writes Web explanations, records podcasts, and runs a tabletop role-playing game for his family and friends. Check out his work at jimkang.com.

Brian Kelly (“Throwing the Die at Mallarmé”) pulled the JavaScript together in a single night. His insights into quantum computing and code golfing are invaluable additions to this hunt.

Deena Larsen (“Throwing the Die at Mallarmé”) is a hypertext addict who admits to hailing from Marble Springs and who writes complexicated stuff for her own am/b/use/meant. See Deena Larsen. She loves to cobble together dark slippers of mystery from various sources, including her favorite: A.E. Housman’s “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff” and odd argot for the innumerable dice throws during the past year of zooming game nights along with echoes of Mallarmé’s words.

Milton Läufer is an Argentinian writer, journalist, and teacher who lives in Berlin. He has published articles and short stories in Esquire, Vice, Guernica, CIA Revista, and Otra Parte and has participated in art exhibitions in Latin America, the US, and Europe. He earned a creative writing MFA at NYU and is now doing a PhD there focused on digital literature in Latin America. He was the 2016–2017 writer-in-residence at The Trope Tank, at MIT. In 2015 he published Lagunas, a partially algorithmic-generated novel, online. His second computer generated novel, A Noise Such as a Man Might Make, was published in 2018 by Counterpath. See miltonlaufer.com.ar.

Will Luers (“Chance Infections”) 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. He is the founding editor of thedigitalreview.com and managing editor of electronicbookreview.com. 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. will-luers.com Twitter: @wluers.

Vi Meyer (“Wrong Time”) is a queer programmer and poet. She loves romance and relationships. See meyer.dev.

Jason Nelson (“Rome, Kansas,” “State Highway 160”) is a creator of curious and wondrous digital poems and fictions of odd lives, builder of confounding art games and all manner of curious digital creatures. He professes digital art and writing at the Digital Culture program at the University of Bergen in Norway. Aside from coaxing his students into breaking, playing, and morphing their creativity with all manner of technologies, he exhibits widely in galleries and journals, with work featured around the globe at FILE, ACM, LEA, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, ARS, ELO, and dozens of other acronyms. There are awards to list (Paris Biennale Media Poetry Prize, Digital Writing Prize), organizational boards he frequents (Australia Council Literature Board and the Electronic Literature Organization), and fellowships he’s adventured into (Fulbright, Moore and others) along with other accolades (Webby Award), but in the Web based realm where his work resides, Jason is most proud of the visitors his artwork/digital poetry portal attracts each year. See more at secrettechnology.com and dpoetry.com.

Sînziana Păltineanu (“Parthenogenesis”) is an experimental fiction writer and researcher based in Berlin and working at the crossings of fiction and history writing, queer feminism, and librarianship. As an exophonic writer, Sînziana seeks to craft a deviant use of the English language. The predominant themes of their work have been queer feminism and writing from within and against constructs of nationalism. See s-paltineanu.gitlab.io and @s_paltineanu.

patternseeing (“Under elsewhere skies”) is an art and design research practice with exploratory interests in human experience and cognition. See Instagram: @patternseeing, Twitter: @patternseeing, and patternseeing.wordpress.com.

Aleyshka Estevez Quintana (“Emoji Horoscopes”) is a graduate student at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez. She is currently a research assistant in the Archivo de Respuestas Emergencias de Puerto Rico. Since the Covid-19 pandemic began, she has spent a shocking number of hours in her Animal Crossing Island. You can visit using code DA-1133-5608-6226 or visit her site: alienliterature.com—which she has spent significantly less time on.

Agustin Santa Rosa (“Máquinx de Hacer Máquinxs de Hacer Futurxs”) is an Argentinean writer and digital archivist. They are the editor-in-chief of Dead Alive, a collaborative press and online space. They are an alum of School for Poetic Computation and Recurse Center. They will soon be a graduate of Maryland Institute College of Art—for more work see Tito Rosa.

Daniel Temkin (“AfterAramSaroyan”) is an artist and writer whose work examines the clash between systemic logic and human irrationality. It includes hand-rendered Dither Studies and a dialect of JS that allows porogrammers to misspelll everything. His blog esoteric.codes covers esolangs, code art, and other projects that challenge conventional notions of computing. It was the 2014 recipient of the ArtsWriters.org grant, developed in residence at the New Museum's NEW INC incubator, and has been exhibited at ZKM. His work can be seen at danieltemkin.com.

Lee Tusman (“A Throw of the Text”) is a new media artist and educator working in collectives and DIY communities creating art, tools and community projects. He works in code, collage, sound, and text to produce works for museums, galleries, artist-run spaces, websites, and virtual environments. Tusman is an organizer at Babycastles, a NYC-based collective and art space fostering and amplifying diverse voices in videogame culture. He is founder and co-organizer of Processing Community Day NYC and host of the podcast Artists and Hackers. Tusman has a BA in sociology from Brandeis University and a MFA from UCLA Design | Media Arts. He is assistant professor of new media and computer science at Purchase College. See leetusman.com.

Ted Warnell (“American Dream 8,” “The TAPER Caper,” “Welcome to the ’neath text”) lives on the western edge of a great Canadian prairie. See warnell.com.

Mark Wolff (“Des Coups d’Un Coup de dés,” “The Roll of a Simulated Die will Never Be Random”)is a professor of French and chair of Modern Languages at Hartwick College (Oneonta, New York, USA). His research is currently focused on the early Oulipo and its use of computers to define and explore potentiality. See markwolff.name.

David Thomas Henry Wright (“The impossibility of an ending in the mind of a compulsive gambler”) won the 2018 Queensland Literary Awards’ Digital Literature Prize and 2019 Robert Coover Award for a work of Electronic Literature (2nd prize). He has been shortlisted for multiple national and international 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 Masters (creative writing) from the University of Edinburgh, and taught creative writing at China’s top university, Tsinghua. He is currently co-editor of The Digital Review, a narrative consultant for Stanford University’s Smart Primer research project, and an associate professor at Nagoya University. See davidthomashenrywright.com.

Kathy Wu (“Instructions for Care”, “Possible Futures of Planet Earth”) is a Chinese-American artist + techworker currently thinking about softness, electricity, writing as/within labor. She has read work at Babycastles’s WordHack and New Narratives Reclaiming Asian Identity. Previously, she was research staff at the MIT Media Lab and an ITP NYU community member. She has a BFA from RISD in graphic design and literary arts and is currently visiting faculty there, teaching about computation and poetics. In this issue, she is thinking about the role of randomness in creating prophecies and/or prayers for imagination and care. Social @pondermake on Twitter // kaaathy.com.