About Taper #8

Submissions for Issue #9

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 #9 invites submissions in response to the theme “Nine Lives.” We seek works that address cultural associations of the number 9, such as a cat’s nine lives, the nine muses in Greek Mythology, Dante’s nine circles of Hell, and nine as an auspicious number in Chinese culture. Alternatively, works could address abstract aspects of the number nine, such as its relations to geometrical figures (nonagons), the symmetry of the number, how it behaves mathematically, or its impact on poetic forms (e.g., the nonet).

Submission Details

Download our template in a zipfile so 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 if you wish a creative statement) 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 pages will be self-contained following Taper’s vision. It also has the practical purpose of allowing all of Taper to work 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 #9, 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 Sept 1, 2022 at 11:59 PM AoE. Taper #9 will be published in Fall 2022. There will be no deadline extensions.

We invite submissions from those interested in participating at ninelives@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 (“Honest Slots”) 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 is completing a PhD in Creative Writing at The University of Western Australia.

Sebastian Bartlett Fernandez (“Lambda Blaster”) is an EECS undergraduate student at MIT, concentrating on artificial intelligence. He is particularly interested in programming language design, generative deep learning, and explainable AI. Sebastian is also an arcade game enthusiast who owns and repairs vintage coin-operated games. See sebastianbartlett.com.

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. See kylebooten.me.

Harrison "Harry" Bronfeld lives in Brooklyn, NY and is 5'10" and a half, half an inch taller than his younger brother. (harrisonbronfeld@gmail.com)

Nanna Debois Buhl (“Pattern Machines (Anni Albers I)”, “Pattern Machines (Anni Albers II)”, “Pattern Machines (Weaving the Word)”) is a visual artist whose practice draws connections across time periods and between micro and macro perspectives. Through studies spanning plants and particles, clouds and computer memory she connects scientific, aesthetic, and speculative perspectives in order to nurture attentiveness to materials and to tell counter-histories. Her work materializes as photographs, weavings, installations, films, algorithm-based works, artist’s books, and public commissions. She is currently a Mads Øvlisen PhD fellow in artistic practice at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and Copenhagen University and a member of the MIT Trope Tank. See nannadeboisbuhl.net. Facebook: nannadebois.buhl/ Instagram: @nannadeboisbuhl

Angela Chang (“Sunday Afternoon”) 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.

Spencer Chang (“8-bite”) is a creative technologist who enjoys creating bridges at the seams. He cares about community-cultivated technology for empowering intimacy, creativity, and play, the kind that feels like home-cooked software that is sustainable in the long-term. Currently, he's tinkering with agencyful tools, poetic software, soulful speculations of futures through his work at Coda, on Twitter: @spencerc99, at Verses, and at spencerchang.me.

Kelsey Chen (“8-bite”) is an expert of the makeshift. Mediums that are currently capturing much of Kelsey’s time and attention include wood, ceramics, and conversation. She is doing her PhD in modern thought and literature at Stanford, investigating discourses of the future, especially in science-fiction, speculative art, and solarpunk. She is dreaming with Verses, an art-technology collective invested in thinking through and scaffolding interdependent digital futures through poetic technical artifacts. Her work can be found at kelschen.com and she is @silkpunkbot on Twitter.

Jan de Weille (“A bit too far”, “ZX”) is a retired biologist and lives in Montpellier, France. He likes to create programs that make sound. The first (8-bit) computer he could afford was a ZX-Spectrum.

Colorless Green Ideas (“Blocky Times,” “Tears in Bits”) contributors to Taper #8 were Paolo Curtoni and Luca Dini. Paolo Curtoni works on the border between art, science and technology. At a point where language and the sense of words meet the machine and become a shape, a wave. For decades he has been combining his artistic activity with his entrepreneurial and research activity in language technologies, with a special predilection for generative and sound art forms. Luca Dini is a computational linguist and a researcher in NLP. He was active since the nineties in the domain of poetry (in Italian) and recently became interested into generative poetry, with special attention to algorithmic ways of producing desired tones. Colorless Green Ideas on Twitter: @Paolo_Curtoni @dini1789

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

Daniel Elfanbaum (“Bits”) is a writer from St. Louis who's been living in the Boston area for a while now. He usually works in prose but likes writing code very much also. He can be found on the internet most places @delfanbaum and he has a website at danielelfanbaum.com.

Paul Fagot (Binarhymes) is a graphic and interactive design student. His current masters thesis focuses on digital writing. More tinkerer than developer, code his is medium of choice. You can contact him at his non-updated Instagram account: @paulft_

Leonardo Flores is chair of the English Department at Appalachian State University. He served as president of the Electronic Literature Organization from 2019–2022. He was the 2012–2013 Fulbright Scholar in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway and was a professor in the English Department at University of Puerto Rico: Mayagüez Campus from 1994 to 2019. His research areas are electronic literature, with a focus on digital poetry, and the history and strategic growth of the field. He’s known for I ♥ E-Poetry; Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3; “Third Generation Electronic Literature;” and the Antología Lit(e)Lat, Volume 1. For more information on his current work, visit leonardoflores.net.

Katy Ilonka Gero (“Precision Machine Design”) is a writer and computer scientist. Her poems and essays have can be found in the html review, Catapult, Stirring Lit, and more. She's pursuing a PhD in computer science at Columbia University and was recently a poetry resident at Vermont Studio Center. She's on twitter @katyilonka and you can find more of her work at katygero.com.

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

William Lockett (“8-Fold BEFLIX Circle Dot Cyclops”) is a media historian working at the boundary of art and science. Media historians have said that old devices preserve past ways of sensing. Historians of video games have argued that such equipment supports making and thinking, now, by preserving stable, meaningfully-constrained contexts for creative coding. Another view: the history of media is a history of elementary logical forms that, when taken up by people, situate humans within mutable communicative and cosmological contexts. I have recreated a program once written in Ken Knowlton’s BEFLIX language, by Carol Bosche and Bela Julesz, not to faithfully replicate the original code but to guide a revisitation of a past context of coding. Beginning again, imperfectly, checking and guessing against documents from the past, I recoded as a way to study what Erwin Panofsky meant by meaning: form and mind comingling provoke reference to context and cosmology under revision. Grounded in the work, recoding can guide the collection and interpretation of traces of the thoughts that that code may once have incited in those who wrote it and observed its results. For facts, use your browser’s Tools => Browser Tools => Page Source (Firefox) or View => Developer => View Source (Chrome). See williamlockett.com.

Marina Mac Cord (“CHAR_BIT 8,” “memory leak,” “segfault”) can be found by the sun and sea in Rio, where she is from and lives at the moment. She graduated in literature and linguistics, did a crazy intensive year in a free 24/7 no teachers software engineering school in California and now works in the machines that run the same school in her beloved tropical city. She has no links (yet) but you can send her an e-mail at marinamacc@hotmail.com.

Kay Savetz (“Sunday Afternoon”) is co-host of Antic: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast, where they have published more than 400 oral histories with people involved with the early home computer industry, and Eaten By A Grue, a podcast about interactive fiction. They have written several books about technology, including Terrible Nerd, a memoir, and are a regular contributor to Juiced.GS, a magazine devoted to the Apple II computer. Kay volunteers time with the Internet Archive and the Vintage Computer Federation. They live in Oregon. See savetz.com.

Eugenio Tisselli practices programming as a form of writing, and writes poems following algorithmic procedures. He has published his work using different media formats, and has presented it at international festivals, talks and exhibitions. He slowly uploads most of his pieces and texts to his website — motorhueso.net.

Helen Shewolfe Tseng (“A Compass of Lunar Trigrams”) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, witch, naturalist, and creative coder based in San Francisco, California. For more signs of life, see shewolfe.co and @wolfchirp.

Joanna Slusarewicz (“Word Weave”) is currently a PhD student in Carnegie Mellon's Engineering and Public Policy program. She is interested in using mathematics to investigate the structure of language and our relationships with meaning and randomness. See observablehq.com/@penguin137.

Andy Wallace (“Video Music”) 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. Website: andymakes.com, Twitter: @Andy_Makes, mastodon: @andymakes.

David Thomas Henry Wright (“Honest Slots”) 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.