About Taper #9

Submissions for Issue #10

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 #10 invites submissions in response to the theme “Powers of Ten.” We are inspired by the exponentially combinatorial poetics Raymond Queneau proposed with his 1961 book Cent mille milliards de poèmes, which produced 10¹⁴ different sonnets. We also are interested in allusions to numerical, rating, and metrical systems, binary code, decades, the Ten Commandments, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and other cultural associations with the number ten.

Submission Details

Download our template in a zip file 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 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 #10, 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 January 15, 2023 at 11:59 PM AoE. Taper #10 will be published in Spring 2023. There will be no deadline extensions.

We invite submissions from those interested in participating at powers@badquar.to. Simply attach your work in one zip file containing your HTML 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.

Jim Andrews (“Sea of Nine <=> c(9)”) has been publishing vispo.com since 1996. It’s his life’s work. It’s a site of interactive, multimedia poetry and essays on language, art, and technology. He did a degree in English and studied three more years of math and computer science at UVic in Canada. He lives in Vancouver.

Chris Arnold (“The Jaguar”) 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 he’s completing a PhD in Creative Writing at The University of Western Australia.

Kyle Booten is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. His poems written with the assistance or interference of algorithms have appeared in Lana Turner, Fence, Boston Review, Blackbox Manifold, and elsewhere. Nightingale, his browser extension that fills the web with Keatsian pop-up ads, is available for free in the Chrome Web Store. See kylebooten.me.

Angela Chang (“No Knead”) 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.

Kavi Duvvoori (“The Penultimate”) is a PhD student / writer (and other things) currently based in Kitchener, Ontario. They have studied math, literary arts, digital arts and new media, and English. Their interests include rhetorics of synthesized language, experimental literature, borders and migration, birds, speculative fiction, lists, linguistics, literary programming, the limits of language, worldbuilding, arts of failure, infrastructural geographies, the search for ways of being that reject hierarchy and domination, sauteing, maps, and evasiveness. They have published a couple small pieces in online publications.

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

Katy Ilonka Gero is a writer and computer scientist. Her poems and essays can be found in the html review, Catapult, Stirring Lit, and more. She’s just defended her PhD dissertation in computer science at Columbia University and was recently a poetry resident at Vermont Studio Center. You can find more of her work at katygero.com.

Jim Gouldstone (“Qitty”) can be described in less than two kilobytes.

Alicia Guo (“Hell is Overthinking”, “Life Plan”) is a technologist who enjoys thinking of new forms of collaboration for creativity and presence. She is also interested in the personalities of physical spaces and designing personal environments. Her research at the MIT Media Lab explores the bridge between technological tools, creativity, and agency. She can be found on Twitter @upcycledwords or at aliciaguo.com.

Michael Hurtado (“999 calorías de César Vallejo”) is a mathematician, technologist, new media artist, and poet. He is a professor in the Department of Architecture at Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas, a fellow of the FabLearn program at Columbia University, and co-director of Masmédulab: poetry and new media laboratory (@masdedulab). He received the VIDA16 award from Fundación Telefónica and the first edition of the Hub Musical Chile award. His poems have been published in the anthology Nós da Poesia Volume 08, I Mostra Virtual de Poesia Visual in Brazil, Bufo Magazine #2, and illitera.com. His electronic poems are part of collections such as the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 4 and the Cartografía Digital Latinoamericana.

Damon Duc Pham (“A cat writes itself”) works with sound, computation, digital media, language, and science. He is from California and currently lives in Hồ Chí Minh city. He’s informed by experience working as a statistician; he’s guided by a respect for interiority, aesthetic pleasure, and just trying to do good in the world. Find him at damondpham.github.io, @damondpham, and soon at especially.bandcamp.com.

Vinicius Marquet (“Blackbox”) Vinicius Marquet is author of “Bucle: Archivo de ficciones” (Centro de cultura digital, 2017), a hyperfictional short story based on Ulises Carrión's life and artworks; “Anacron, Hipótesis de un producto todo” (Marquet and Wolfson, 2009), a recombinatory poem that calls to the dead and the imagination; and “Cuéntanos un secreto project” (2008), a workshop and archive about secrets. Today he defines himself as a constant question, a possible variable, and a faithful statement. Visit him at viniciusmarquet.com.

Aia Meyer (“_ Lives”) is a queer software engineer based in Brooklyn. She loves romance and relationships. See meyer.dev.

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 (“K9-tailed”) 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.

Andy Wallace (“Consciousness Transferral Procedure (Hour 41)”) 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.

Ted Warnell (“Acid Rain 9”) lives on the western edge of a great Canadian prairie. See warnell.com.

Caroline Willer-Burchardi (“Natural Imperfections”,“Nein Finality”) is a student at Horace Mann School, NY. She is particularly interested in the potential of digital storytelling and a computer’s capability to be creative. She loves all things robotics and creative writing, and deeply enjoys debating with her younger sister issues of modest importance.

David Thomas Henry Wright (“The Jaguar”, “NHK MAN”) 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.