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Backslash Lit
About: Backslash Lit is a webzine seeking to publish and learn through electronic literature: creative works that use computational and electronic mediums as an art form.
“We seek to challenge the line between STEM and the arts and publish what cannot be traditionally printed on paper. This magazine is for the interdisciplinary and antidisciplinary, for the experimental and unconventional, for all that calls into question what art really means.
We began in May 2020 as purely an online journal. Starting fall 2021, we began focusing our efforts on creating informational content leading up to our publication cycle. We seek to publish two issues per year and share resources and blog content year-round.”
Submissions: Backslash Lit are looking for pieces that use digital and electronic mediums as a vessel for creativity, including but not limited to source code poetry, hypertext poetry, interactive fiction, ASCII art, and generative art. We welcome pieces that step out of the box and don’t fit into one particular category. To get a feel of what we seek, please take a look at previous issues.
We encourage anyone to submit—amateurs, professionals, artists who don’t code, coders who don’t make art. Please don’t self reject!
Simultaneous submissions, multiple submissions, and re-prints of previously published work are accepted. Please let us know if your work has been submitted or published elsewhere in your submission form and contact us ASAP if your work is picked up somewhere else. We would be more than willing to publish your work if we have permission to do so.
Authors retain all rights to their work after publication. Unfortunately, we are unable to pay contributors at this time.
If your piece is accepted, you are welcome to submit again anytime! During heavier submission windows, we will prioritize those who haven’t yet been featured.
In your submission, please include:
- Your piece! We anticipate a diverse range of submission formats. Send us text files, websites, word documents, source code files, GitHub repositories, videos (max. 5 minutes), whatever fits your project. We’ve done our best to allow for as many submission formats as possible on the submission form, but Google Forms has its limits. If the form cannot accommodate your work, please email us your submission at backslashlitmag[at]gmail[dot]com.
Note on submitting runnable projects: please make sure the program is runnable by all of our editors! The best way to do that is to send your work as a repl.it repository so that we can easily run the code in our browser and, should the piece be accepted, embed it on the site.
- A description of your progress: We want to make sure the pieces we showcase are authentically created using digital means. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if an art piece is computer-generated or manually created, so drop us a note about the programming languages, tools, algorithms, and/or sources you used.
If your generative piece is derived from the art of another creator, you MUST cite the original source, regardless of how similar or different your piece is from the original. We do not tolerate plagiarism at Backslash and will not hesitate to remove any work that infringes on another artist’s intellectual property.
- A biographical statement 2-5 sentences long and written in the third person. Feel free to include social media links! We try not to edit your bios in the publication process, but may make small adjustments for consistency. Bios written in the first person will be changed to third.
- An optional artist’s note if there’s anything you’d like viewers of your piece to know (process, meaning, background, and so on).
We do not tolerate submissions promoting racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, ableism, xenophobia, or otherwise hateful content.
- What is [code poetry / new media art / hypertext fiction / etc.]? No worries if you aren’t familiar with the mediums we publish! Just head on to our Q&A to familiarize yourself with a few common mediums or to answer any other questions you may have. The mediums we’ve included are by no means an extensive list of mediums we accept, but we hope they provide you with some inspiration if you’re looking for an idea for your submission.
Pay: N/A
Deadline: Submit HERE by February 4, 2022. For more info go to http://backslashlit.com/submit/