John Howland Cayley 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.
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. 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 poetYang 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. 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. 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. There are a number of discussions of both Cayley's theoretical contributions and certain of his works in Scott Rettberg's Electronic Literature. Katherine Hayles discusses Cayley's riverIsland in 'The Time of Digital Poetry: From Object to Event,' and Tong-King Lee devotes a large part of chapter 7 in his co-authored book, Translation and translanguaging to Cayley's translation. In 2009, Cayley launched, with long-term collaborator, Daniel C. Howe, The Readers Project, '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. Cayley's most recent work explores transactive synthetic language and led to his creation of a skill for the Amazon Echo, The Listeners.
Works (selected)
Digital language art as aurature in transactive synthetic language deployed using Amazon's Alexa Voice Services.
Poetic generator that spells the time and names moments. Hypercard on disk. Johannes Maibaum produced a critical appreciation of The Speaking Clock for YouTube.
