Nick Montfort

Taper, An Online Magazine for Tiny Computational Poems

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.

Process Pages

Nick Montfort

Process Pages is a collection of 21 very tiny Web pages that run live on three single-board Linux computers, driving three projectors. These are visual poems, artworks, and computational artifacts. They are not the typical sorts of Web pages that one visits when online, however. If anything, these non-interactive pages are more like demoscene productions that use the browser as a platform. They relate to sizecoding practices, with none of the pages being more than 180 bytes long. Unlike most demoscene productions, however, they explore Unicode, the nature of writing, the nature of poetry. They explore how rather obvious computational techniques can manipulate characters in a compelling way and use default fonts and the standard black-on-white presentation of text. As part of this installation, visitors are invited to take a single sheet with the complete source code of the 21 pages.

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.