About Taper #7

Submissions for Issue #8

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.

Taper #8 invites submissions in response to the theme “8-Bit Nostalgia." The 8-bit era was characterized by remarkable creativity in working with constraints, something Taper seeks to emulate. We seek works inspired by 8-bit computing, music, games, graphic art, character sets as well as the number of bits that constitute a byte and its multiple representations. We also welcome submissions that address cultural associations of the number 8, such as fortune in Chinese and other Asian cultures, holiness in Japanese culture, and other religious associations. Alternatively, works could address abstract aspects of the number eight, such as its relations to geometrical figures (cubic vertices, octagons), the symmetry of the number, how it becomes the symbol of infinity when rotated, or its impact on poetic forms (octosyllabic lines, various kinds of octameter, octets, octaves, etc).

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 validate the page after you finish.
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 to function without a network connection, for instance in a gallery setting.
Please refer to this About page for license terms under which all poems have been and will be released; by submitting to Taper #8, 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 ~~April 1, 2022~~ April 15, 2022 at 11:59 PM AoE. Taper #8 will be published in Spring 2022.

We invite submissions from those interested in participating at eightbit@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 (“flâneur treadmill”) 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 the Web editor of Westerly, 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 project is Nightingale, a Keatsian browser extension (available in the Chrome Web Store). He was recently Nokturno.fi’s poet-in-digital-residence, and his poems written with the assistance or interference of algorithms have appeared in Lana Turner, Fence, Boston Review, and Denver Quarterly Review. See kylebooten.me.

v buckenham (“Display Case”) is a generative artist and creative technologist. They make creative tools to enable anyone to do new and interesting things with technology—such as Cheap Bots, Done Quick!, a platform for making Twitterbots that hosts over 20,000 bots. They have a background in videogames, and have worked on the award-winning games Beasts of Balance, Mutazione and Panoramical. They also work as a curator, and were one of the founders of the festival of play Now Play This. Their homepage is at v21.io.

Angela Chang (“Starter”) 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.

Jan de Weille (“Ants”, “This Code = this code”, “Tic Tac Wonder”) has been a researcher in biology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in first Nice and then Montpellier. He now enjoys retirement. In the past he has made software for bio-data analysis called SERF and programs to compute music, including Soundmaps, that was used to produce works like “Best of Windows.” His music has been presented in festivals and venues (Lancashire, New York, Miami, Kaliningrad, Atlanta among others). Occasionally he collaborates with other artists as Annie Abrahams, Bérénice Belpaire and Igor Stromajer. Find out more at bram.org/sound/deweille.html.

A. Dorsk (“Stevie”) lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and sometimes writes code that does quirky things.

Nils Fagerberg (“A snowball’s chance in Hanoi”) lives in New Hampshire where he also enjoys dabbling in interactive fiction. He doesn't do social media but you can reach him by email at nils@fagerburg.com.

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 co-edited the first Anthology of Latin American Electronic Literature. For more information on his current work, visit leonardoflores.net.

Josh Grams (“Toolshed”) has been a full-time organic market gardener on a homestead in rural Maine since 2007, and an enthusiastic hobby programmer since he was a teen. He enjoys tinkering with many things and can occasionally be found on Twitter @JoshuaIGrams.

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

Milton Läufer (“The Emerging Gardens of Babel”) is an Argentinian writer, journalist and teacher. He has published articles and short stories in Esquire, Vice, Guernica, CIA Revista, and Otra Parte, among others. He earned an MFA at New York University and currently he is finishing a PhD there focused on digital literature in Latin America. He was the 2016–2017 writer-in-residence of The Trope Tank, MIT. He has published the novels Lagunas (2015)—partially algorithmically-generated and available online on his website; A Noise Such as a Man Might Make (2018, Counterpath, Colorado)—computer generated; and Los restos humanos (2021, Suburbano Ediciones, Florica). He has participated in art exhibitions in Latin America, the US and Europe. He lives in Berlin. See miltonlaufer.com.ar.

Vinicius Marquet (“Instructions about how to (dis)appear completely The rest is left over”) is a designer, artist and human. In 2017 Centro de Cultura digital in Mexico city published his short story “Bucle: archivo de ficciones,” an hyperfiction based on Ulises Carrión life and artworks. In 2009 his project Anacrón was included in the third volume of the ELO’s Electronic Literature Collection. Currently he practices andinquires on the workshop as a tool for assembling society, research methodology and an aesthetic experience in the network and programmable media. Come and say “Q'onda vato” on Instagram @vinimarquet or visit his website at viniciusmarquet.com.

Martin O'Leary (“Sisters”) is an artist, designer, teacher and researcher, based in Bristol, UK. His practice focuses on the idea of place, and on the juxtaposition of the physical, digital and imaginary worlds. He is currently the in-house creative technologist at the Pervasive Media Studio. Connect with him on Twitter @mewo2 and at mewo2.com.

Alexandra Rose (“Marie Curie - Thank You Note”) is a programmer, writer, and artist working in mediums from clay to code to video. She lives in the Sonoran Desert with her wife and two cats. She is on Twitter as @bigmoodenergy and YouTube as youtube.com/c/bigmoodenergy.

Ardalan SadeghiKivi (“Oleum Rivulet”) (b. 1995, Tehran, Iran) is an artist, writer, and programmer who creates computational interfaces that simulate borderline human behavior in the form of software, painting, sculpture, and computer-generated text. He graduated from the University of Tehran in 2018 with a degree in Architectural Engineering and is currently pursuing a Master of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. SadeghiKivi lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts; he operates at The Trope Tank, a Comparative Media Studies/Writing research group at MIT, and acts as the co-editor of Before|After, the 50th volume of MIT Press peer-reviewed journal Thresholds. He exists on Instagram as @arthalun.

Cristóbal Sciutto (“Rayleigh”) designs tools for wielding media. He is from Brazil, Argentina, or Ohio, but lives in New York City. He can be reached on Twitter @tobyshooters or at cristobal.space.

Andy Wallace (“Night Voyagers”) is an independent game designer and creative coder who lives in NYC. He is also a founding member of the non-profit Death By Audio Arcade collective. He likes to trick computers into making art. His websites: andymakes.com, Twitter: @Andy_Makes, mastodon: @andymakes.

Ted Warnell (“Moons of Jupiter 7”, “Verdigris 7”) lives on the western edge of a great Canadian prairie. See warnell.com.

David Thomas Henry Wright (“flâneur treadmill”) 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 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.