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by | Feb 6, 2018 | Large Trees

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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 1986-88 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

See also

References

  1. ^ "Faculty". Literary Arts. Brown University. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
  2. ^ "Results of Final Examinations held in June 1978". Durham University Gazette. 24 (New Series): 46. 31 January 1979. Retrieved 14 March 2020.
  3. ^ Cayley, John (September 2007). "Screen Writing: a practice-based, EuroRelative introduction to electronic literature and poetics". Third Text. 21 (5): 603–609. doi:10.1080/09528820701599743. S2CID 147345093.
  4. ^ Edmond, Jacob (2019). Make it the same: poetry in the age of global media. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231190022.
  5. ^ "John Cayley". ELMCIP Knowledge Base. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
  6. ^ a b "Winners". ELO Prizes. Electronic Literature Organization. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
  7. ^ Rettberg, Scott (2019). Electronic Literature. Cambridge and Medford: Polity Press. ISBN 978-1-5095-1677-3.
  8. ^ Hayles, N. Katherine (2006). "The time of digital poetry: from object to event". In Morris, Adelaide; Swiss, Thomas (eds.). New media poetics: contexts, technotexts, and theories. MIT Press. pp. 181–209. ISBN 0262-134632.
  9. ^ Bynham, Mike; Lee, Tong-King (2019). Translation and translanguaging. London: Routledge. ISBN 9781138067042.
  10. ^ "The Readers Project". thereadersproject.org. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
  11. ^ Portela, Manuel (2013). Scripting Reading Motions: the codex and the computer as self-reflexive machines. Cambridge: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262019460.
  12. ^ Cayley, John (2016). "The Listeners: an instance of aurature". Cream City Review. 40 (2): 172–187. doi:10.1353/ccr.2016.0079. S2CID 186050506. Retrieved 9 March 2018.
  13. ^ Marques da Silva, Ana (2017). "Speaking to listening machines: literary experiments with aural interfaces". Electronic Book Review. Retrieved 30 March 2019.
  14. ^ Maibaum, Johannes (August 16, 2016). The Speaking Clock, John Cayley, HyperCard Program, 1995 – English Version. Medien Theorien. Retrieved August 15, 2019.
  15. ^ Eskelinen, Markku (2012). Cybertext poetics: the critical landscape of new media literary theory. International texts in critical media aesthetics. London: Continuum. p. 57. ISBN 978-1-4411-2438-8.
  16. ^ Cayley, John (2018). "The advent of aurature and the end of (electronic) literature". The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic: 73–94.
  17. ^ Cayley, John (2013). "Pentameters toward the dissolution of certain Vectoralist relations". Amodern. 2: n.p.
  18. ^ Cayley, John (2013). "Terms of reference and Vectoralist transgressions: situating certain literary transactions over networked services". Amodern. 2: n.p. Retrieved 9 March 2018.
  19. ^ Howe, Daniel C.; Cayley, John (2011). "The Readers Project: procedural agents and literary vectors". Leonardo. 44 (4): 317–324. doi:10.1162/LEON_a_00208. S2CID 57560583.
  20. ^ Cayley, John (September 10, 2002). "The code is not the text (unless it is the text)". Electronic Book Review: n.p. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
  21. ^ "2001 Poetry Award Winner". Electronic Literature Organization. 2001. Retrieved 8 March 2018.


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