John Cayley
Canadian pioneer of writing in digital media
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John Howland Cayley (born 1956) is a Canadian pioneer of writing in digital media as well as a theorist of the practice, a poet, and a Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University (from 2007).[1]
Education
After moving to the United Kingdom in the late 1960s, Cayley went to secondary school in the south of England. He read for a degree in Chinese Studies at Durham University, leaving with a 2:1 in 1978.[2]
Career
While still a graduate student and UK-based translator and poet, between the late 1970s and mid 1990s, Cayley began to experiment with using programs and algorithms, coded for newly-accessible personal computers, to manipulate and generate poetic texts.[3]
From 1986 to 1988 Cayley worked as a curator in the Chinese Section of the British Library and, during the same period, founded Wellsweep, an independent micro-press devoted to literary translation from Chinese, chiefly poetry. One of Cayley's early experiments with hypertext and poetry, a late 1990s collaboration with Chinese poet Yang Lian, is discussed in 'Making waves in world literature,' chapter 6 of Jacob Edmond's Make it the same: poetry in the age of global media.[4]
Throughout his career, Cayley has created and developed a number of original formal techniques for the composition and display of digital language art: poetically motivated Markov chain text generation, dynamic text, self-altering text, transliteral morphing, ambient poetry, etc.[5] In 2017, his lifelong contributions to the theory and practice of digital language art earned him the Electronic Literature Organization Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award.[6] There are a number of discussions of both Cayley's theoretical contributions and certain of his works in Scott Rettberg's Electronic Literature.[7] Katherine Hayles discusses Cayley's riverIsland in 'The Time of Digital Poetry: From Object to Event,'[8] and Tong-King Lee devotes a large part of chapter 7 in his co-authored book, Translation and translanguaging to Cayley's translation.[9]
In 2009, Cayley launched, with long-term collaborator, Daniel C. Howe, The Readers Project,[10] 'an aesthetically-oriented system of software agents, designed to explore the culture of human reading.' This project is extensively discussed in Manuel Portela's Scripting Reading Motions.[11]
Cayley's most recent work explores transactive synthetic language and led to his creation of a skill for the Amazon Echo, The Listeners.[12][13]
Works (selected)
- The Listeners. 2015. Digital language art as aurature in transactive synthetic language deployed using Amazon's Alexa Voice Services.
- The Readers Project. 2009. With Daniel C. Howe.
- translation. 2004. Interlingual ambient poetics.
- what we will have of what we are: something past. 2000. With Giles Perring, Douglas Cape and James Waite. Collaborative web-based broadband interactive drama.
- windsound. 1999. Dynamic text movie. Winner of the 2001 Electronic Literature Award for poetry.
- The Speaking Clock. 1995. Poetic generator that spells the time and names moments. Hypercard on disk. Johannes Maibaum produced a critical appreciation of The Speaking Clock for YouTube.[14] Markku Eskelinen analyzes this work.[15]
Books, chapbooks, artists books (selected)
- Grammalepsy: essays on digital language art. London: Bloomsbury. 2018. ISBN 978-1-5013-3576-1.
- Image Generation: a reader. London: Veer Books. 2015. ISBN 978-1907088827.
- How It Is in Common Tongues. Providence: NLLF Press. 2012. ISBN 978-0948454301. With Daniel C. Howe. Limited edition conceptual literary artist's book.
- Tianshu: Passages in the Making of a Book. London: Bernard Quaritch. 2009. ISBN 978-0955085291. by John Cayley with Xu Bing and others, ed. Katherine Spears.
Scholarship (selected)
- "The Advent of Aurature and the End of (Electronic) Literature"[16]
- "Pentameters toward the Dissolution of Certain Vectoralist Relations"[17]
- "Terms of Reference & Vectoralist Transgressions: Situating Certain Literary Transactions over Networked Services"[18]
- "The Readers Project: Procedural Agents and Literary Vectors"[19]
- "The Code Is Not the Text (Unless It Is the Text)"[20]
Recognition
- Electronic Literature Organization inaugural prize for Poetry 2001.[21]
- Marjorie Luesebrink Career Achievement Award 2017.[6]