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 Brown University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. It is the List of colonial colleges, seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the US, founded in 1764 as the ' ...

(from 2007).

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 Durham University (legally the University of Durham) is a collegiate university, collegiate public university, public research university in Durham, England, founded by an Act of Parliament (UK), Act of Parliament in 1832 and incorporated by r ...

, leaving with a 2:1 in 1978.

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. From 1986 to 1988 Cayley worked as a curator in the Chinese Section of the

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. Based in London, it is one of the largest libraries in the world, with an estimated collection of between 170 and 200 million items from multiple countries. As a legal deposit li ...

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''. 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 In probability theory and statistics, a Markov chain or Markov process is a stochastic process describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event. Informally ...

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 The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is a nonprofit organization "established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature". It hosts annual conferences, awards annual prizes for works of a ...

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 Scott Rettberg is an American digital artist and scholar of electronic literature based in Bergen, Norway. He is the co-founder and served as the first executive director of the Electronic Literature Organization. He leads the Center for Digita ...

's ''Electronic Literature''.

Katherine Hayles Nancy Katherine Hayles (born 1943) is an American literary critic, most notable for her contribution to the fields of literature and science, electronic literature, and American literature. Her scholarship primarily focuses on the "relations ...

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 Amazon Echo, often shortened to Echo, is a brand of smart speakers developed by Amazon (company), Amazon. Echo devices connect to the voice-controlled Virtual assistant, intelligent personal assistant service. ''Amazon Alexa, Alexa'', which resp ...

, ''The Listeners.''

Works (selected)

* Digital language art as aurature in transactive synthetic language deployed using Amazon's Alexa Voice Services. * With Daniel C. Howe. * Interlingual ambient poetics. * With Giles Perring, Douglas Cape and James Waite. Collaborative web-based broadband interactive drama. * Dynamic text movie. Winner of the 2001 Electronic Literature Award for poetry. * Poetic generator that spells the time and names moments. Hypercard on disk. Johannes Maibaum produced a critical appreciation of ''The Speaking Clock'' for YouTube. Markku Eskelinen analyzes this work.

Books, chapbooks, artists books (selected)

* * * With Daniel C. Howe. Limited edition conceptual literary artist's book. * by John Cayley with Xu Bing and others, ed. Katherine Spears.

Scholarship (selected)

* "The Advent of Aurature and the End of (Electronic) Literature" * "Pentameters toward the Dissolution of Certain Vectoralist Relations" * "Terms of Reference & Vectoralist Transgressions: Situating Certain Literary Transactions over Networked Services" * "The Readers Project: Procedural Agents and Literary Vectors" *"The Code Is Not the Text (Unless It Is the Text)"

Recognition

inaugural prize for Poetry 2001. * Marjorie Luesebrink Career Achievement Award 2017.

References

External links

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Cayley, John 1956 births Living people Brown University faculty Canadian male poets Poets from Ottawa 20th-century Canadian poets 20th-century Canadian male writers 21st-century Canadian poets 21st-century Canadian male writers Alumni of St Cuthbert's Society, Durham Canadian electronic literature writers Electronic literature critics