Taper

If you read the Taper 12 about page, you will find that submissions for Taper #13 are due Sept 13 2024, approximately two weeks from the time of this writing.

But what is Taper?

Taper is an online "zine-type"...thing...where digital artists, poets and agitators submit pieces for each published collection. They're usually something between an "interactive poem" a "visualization" or some avant garde HTML experiment. They're very forward thinking and very cool. I've only looked at a couple of the art projects/poems in #9 so far, and I must confess I've missed every Taper installment since #3 in 2019. I bet they just weren't up to date on sending the updates to their mailing list or whatever. But there's definitely some cool stuff in there and I recommend the full archives. I actually submitted this piece for Taper #2, which was about duality, and it got rejected because the file size was too big (embedded JPG), and the editors found the writing too incoherent.

Taper is definitely one of those things that "lives in my head rent free" as the kids say. In fact, yesterday I spent about 2 hours working on a potential submission for Taper 13. I got as far as laying out a webpage and writing some JavaScript for the project, but when I went to add an SVG to the page, I thought, "I better check how big this is getting". At that point, it was about 6 kilobytes, but unfortunately the size limit for submissions is the microscopic, ridiculous, ludicrous 2 kilobytes. I guess they must plan on doing this for 100 years and want to make sure they can fit it all on a floppy disk at the end of it all (sarcasm). Though it might be something like this, where they have ambitions of storing or displaying the zines in some ridiculously retro or restricted medium.

Anyways, I removed the SVG and checked again, but I was still at 4k, twice the limit. At that point I gave up and put my laptop away. I like making weird HTML art/poetry projects, but so far I haven't found a place besides Taper to submit them. And as far as Taper goes, I'm just overweight.