Nick Montfort
Taper is an online literary magazine at http://taper.badquar.to. The magazine is now in its eighth issue and publishes tiny, stand-alone computational poems. They are tiny in that they occupy no more than a few kilobytes — the limit has been 2KB for several issues. They are stand-alone in that all you need is what is the single Web page of the poem; no Google fonts or connections to other APIs are involved. They are computational in that they are made of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, taking the form of interactive games and text generators among other things. They are poems in a broad sense, with many of the works featured not being in any human language. And they are all free software, available under an all-permissive license for study, sharing, and reuse. By publishing this twice-yearly magazine, edited by an independent collective, I hope to encourage people to explore language and literary art, and its intersection with computing, in new ways.
Nick Montfort is a poet and artist who uses computation as his main medium and seeks to uncover how computing and language are entangled with each other and with culture. His computer-generated books include #! and Golem. His digital projects include the collaborations The Deletionist and Sea and Spar Between. Montfort also studies creative computing. MIT Press has published his The New Media Reader, Twisty Little Passages, The Future, and Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities. He directs a lab/studio, The Trope Tank, and is professor of digital media at MIT. He lives in New York City.