Founded in 2016, ORAL.pub publishes poetry/art made for and inseparable from the web (web art, e-poetry, net.art, e-lit, digital language art, etc.). We are open for general submissions until May 31, 2024 and would love to see your work. [NOTE: An extension is likely—check our Instagram for updates!]
ORAL.pub has published websites like Sawako Nakayasu's, James Irwin's, Martha Daghlian's, Jody Zellen's, Shelby Shaw's, Kevin Cadena's, Camila Cañeque's, Shanshan's, Lee Tusman's, Jorge Rodriguez Solorzano's, Sally, Qianxun Chen's, Theadora Walsh's, Pablo Somonte Ruano's, Gwen Harper's, Mabe Fratti's, David L. Johnson's, Fox Hysen's, Amaury Gutierrez’s, Jonathan Mildenberg’s, Eli Payne Mandel’s, Frida Robles’, and Joseph Buckley's. ORAL.pub websites take advantage of their medium; their modes of interaction are meaningful and often eccentric. Submissions:
must be interactive
may be in any language or multilingual (we aim to publish at least one multilingual or translated work per issue; see note below)
may be technically very simple or very impressive
take 5-15 minutes to view/read
may be single-page or multi-page
may include collaborations both human and non-human (we encourage you to use ChatGPT for your coding questions!)
are 80-100% complete
do not require post-publication maintenance
may be hosted directly on ORAL.pub
do not require outside explanation
have not already been given institutional visibility (some wiggle room here; email with questions)
You are welcome to submit up to three works. We do not limit the number of works accepted per submission period, and will publish everything we find excellent. Please make sure all your friends submit!
NOTE ON LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION: Submissions may be in any language; please use whichever is most comfortable/meaningful to you—knowing that for languages other than Spanish, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, and English (languages spoken by one or more on our editorial team), we will be using Google translate. If your work is not in English, we will be very excited to work with you and a professional translator to translate it; we will then publish both the English version and the original. If your work is in English but you are also interested in publishing the work in another language that you speak, please make a note of that in your description. We love publishing translations and/or multilingual works!
In addition to our general call for submissions, we also remain open for our special call (originally announced in December) for web-based art/poetry that addresses contemporary genocide. We are looking for works that consider the following: what do you want to remain recorded from this moment &/or how can you document this experience of horror &/or how can a website shock/shake us out of numbness &/or how can an online setting be grounds for moving past one-liners into durational/deep thought/feeling &/or what do we need from the web right now that social media is refusing us &/or your personal/local pain/disgust/disbelief/etc. If you are Palestinian or otherwise personally affected by contemporary genocide, want to make something, and are unable to code it: please send us a brief proposal, and we will try to help you with the tech side.
Founded in 2016, ORAL.pub was on hiatus from 2020-2022. During its first years, ORAL.pub was based in Mexico, and all sites were available in both English and Spanish. Now based in New York and Bremen, we still emphasize careful translation, but welcome all languages (and have resigned to centralizing English). ORAL.pub can’t currently pay contributors. Please do not send us a site you've already submitted unless it's been altered considerably. Email [email protected] if you have any questions!