John Cayley
| John Cayley | |
|---|---|
| Born | John Cayley 20 July 1956 Ottawa, Ontario, Canada |
| 🏳️ Nationality | Canadian |
| 💼 Occupation | |
| Known for | Digital Language Art, Poetry, Translation, Electronic Literature |
| Notable work | windsound, riverIsland, translation, Image Generation, The Listeners, The Readers Project, Grammalepsy |
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John Cayley (born Ottawa, Ontario, Canada 1956) is a writer, translator, poet, publisher, bookdealer, as well as pioneering practitioner and theorist in the field of what he now takes a lead in designating as digital language art.[1][2] He is Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University,[3] where he directs a graduate program in these practices and is also noted for teaching a writing course (founded as "Cave Writing" by Robert Coover) in immersive virtual reality, "Writing3D."[4]
Notable Language Art & Theory[edit]
Cayley's work in programmable media began to be critically noted when printed representations were published in Rothenberg and Joris' monumental Poems for the Millenium,[5] and when Cayley's windsound won the Electronic Literature Organization's inaugural prize for Poetry in 2001.[6] His theoretical work was formative for the field of Electronic Literature. Cayley attempted to answer questions about the specificity of literary work composed in new media by characterizing it as "writing in networked and programmable media."[7] His critical writing was also instrumental in establishing a distinction between code and text in works and practices of digital language art when, in 2002, he published a much-cited article "famously proposing 'that the code is not the text unless it is the text.' He makes the compelling case that we need to pay attention to the distinction between code and language."[8][9] Reflecting on Cayley's distinction Roberto Simanowski writes: “Cayley applies a narrower concept of text to point out the essential differences between writing code and writing literature."[10]
Around this time, Cayley's creative work began to come to the attention of prominent literary critics, particularly those, such as N. Katherine Hayles, with an interest in technology and new media. Hayles discusses Cayley riverIsland at length in an article in The Yale Journal of Criticism where she highlights literary effects of translation from Chinese to English "beautifully on display" and suggests that the view of language expressed by the work "allows Cayley to establish strong parallels between verbal language and the binary code of computer processes."[11]
Deeming Cayley "one of the most prolific and nuanced writers on issues of language, language arts, and its transformations" scholar Alvaro Seiça notes that "Cayley has not only theorized about time, but he has also self-reflexively inscribed time as theme and structure in his creative work, for instance, in the HyperCard piece Speaking Clock (1995), or wotclock (2005)."[12] Cayley, "one of the forerunners of constructing textual instruments,"[13] has created and developed a number of original formal techniques for the composition and display of digital language art: including poetically motivated Markov-chain text generation, dynamic text, self-altering text, transliteral morphing, subliteral difference, and ambient poetics.[14] Ambient poetics are exemplified in Cayley's overboard,[15] recently reengineered for the web.[16] Along with riverIsland, for Andrew Piper, textual instruments like this "place us in a more critical relationship to the 'network' as one of the dominant figures of contemporary thought. As John Cayley intuited, language always goes overboard; its meaning runs past artificial boundaries we establish to contain it."[17]
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" computationally and artistically.[18] The project has produced a number of widely exhibited and discussed outcomes in the form of installations, aesthetic software, visualizations, and derived artifacts in a range of media, including printed books,[18] and these have been studied and written about, including in Manuel Portela's Scripting Reading Motions, which also discusses Cayley's earlier work (pp. 338-47). Portela remarks that the Project's "[a]utomated generative writing is presented as an act of reading that rewrites the text and makes it available for literary reading."[19]
The innovative aspect of Cayley's work extends to his teaching. At Brown University he has developed the practice and pedagogy of writing and language art for virtual reality systems, such as the CAVE (Cave Automated Virtual Environment) and now also Brown's YURT.[20] Cayley's most recent work signals a digitally-driven paradigm shift in language use and language art that he characterizes as the advent of aurature - literary practice in aurality.[21] This move derives in part from The Listeners, a work with transactive synthetic language for Amazon Alexa, the voice-enabled digital assistant embodied in Amazon Echo.[22] Cayley's selected critical writing is collected in Grammalepsy: essays on digital language art.[23] Lastly, Cayley has offered a critical voice in the the realm new media. An excerpt of his views can be found in an extended interview provided in Digital Humanities and Digital Media: Conversations on Politics, Culture, Aesthetics and Literacy[24] [1]
Education[edit]
After moving to the United Kingdom in the late 1960s, Cayley went to secondary school in the south of England and later studied "Chinese Language and Civilization" at Durham University.[1]
Career[edit]
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.[25] 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 publishing house devoted to literary translation from Chinese, chiefly poetry. He left the Library to work for and, eventually, to co-direct the specialist bookseller's Hanshan Tang Books.[26] While working as a bookseller Cayley maintained his practice of digital language art and taught at a number of universities in the United Kingdom. In 1998 he was invited by Jerome Rothenberg to teach courses on electronic writing for the University of California, San Diego. In 2000 He was made and Honorary Fellow of Dartington College of Arts, and an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of English, Royal Holloway College, University of London.[1] In 2007 he joined the faculty of the Department of Literary Arts, Brown University, where he is a full professor and directs a graduate program in Digital Language Art.
Works (selected)[edit]
- The Listeners. 2015. Retrieved 8 March 2018. Digital language art as aurature in transactive synthetic language deployed using Amazon's Alexa Voice Services.
- The Readers Project. 2009. Retrieved 8 March 2018. With Daniel C. Howe.
- translation. 2004. Retrieved 8 March 2018. Interlingual ambient poetics.
- overboard. 2003. Retrieved 8 March 2018. Ambient poetics.
- what we will have of what we are: something past. 2000. Retrieved 8 March 2018. With Giles Perring, Douglas Cape and James Waite. Collaborative web-based broadband interactive drama.
- riverIsland. 1999. Retrieved 8 March 2018. Navigable text movie. QuickTime version 2008.
- windsound. 1999. Retrieved 8 March 2018. Dynamic text movie.
- The Speaking Clock. 1995. Poetic generator that spells the time and names moments. Hypercard on disk.
- Book Unbound. 1995. Indra's Net VI. Hypercard on disk.
- wine flying. 1989. Animated poetic structures underlying a classical Chinese quatrain. Hypercard on disk.
Sketches Available Online[edit]
- Orthographics. 2013. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
- Suflosi. 2013. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
- Readers Live. 2016. Retrieved 9 March 2018. With Daniel C. Howe.
Books, Chapbooks, Artists Books[edit]
- Grammalepsy: essays on digital language art.[23]
- Image Generation: a reader. London: Veer Books. 2015. ISBN 978-1907088827. Search this book on
- How It Is in Common Tongues. Providence: NLLF Press. 2012. ISBN 978-0948454301. Search this book on With Daniel C. Howe. Limited edition conceptual literary artist's book.
- The Image. Providence: NLLF Press. 2012. Search this book on With Daniel C. Howe. Limited edition conceptual literary artist's book produced for installation.
- Tianshu: Passages in the Making of a Book. London: Bernard Quaritch. 2009. ISBN 978-0955085291. Search this book on by John Cayley with Xu Bing and others, ed. Katherine Spears.
- An Essay on THE GOLDEN LION: Han-Shan in Indra's Net. Edinburgh: Morning Star Publications. 1995. Search this book on Limited edition artist's book. (The publisher of Morning Star was Alec Finlay.)
- Under it All: texts, hologography, afterword. London: Many Press. 1993. Search this book on
- Qian Qi (1989). wine flying: a Chinese Quatrain. London: Wellsweep Press. Search this book on Translated, adapted and arranged by John Cayley.
Scholarship (Selected)[edit]
- "The Advent of Aurature and the End of (Electronic) Literature."[21]
- "Reconfiguration: Symbolic Image and Language Art."[27]
- "Of capta, vectoralists, reading and the Googlization of universities" (PDF). Retrieved 9 March 2018.[28]
- "Reading and Giving - Voice and Language". Retrieved 9 March 2018.[29]
- "Terms of Reference & Vectoralist Transgressions: Situating Certain Literary Transactions over Networked Services."[30]
- "The Readers Project: Procedural Agents and Literary Vectors."[31]
- "Time Code Language: New Media Poetics and Programmed Signification."[32]
- "The Code Is Not the Text (Unless It Is the Text)."[9]
Recognition[edit]
- Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) inaugural prize for Poetry 2001.[6]
- Honorable Mention for The Readers Project in the ELO's Robert Coover Award 2016.[33]
- Electronic Literature Organization Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award 2017.[33]
External Pages[edit]
- "John Cayley". Researchers@Brown. Brown University. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
- "John Cayley". ELMCIP Knowledge Base. Retrieved 8 March 2018. [14]
- "P=R=O=G=R=A=M=M=A=T=O=L=O=G=Y". programmatology.shadoof.net. Retrieved 9 March 2018. Cayley's personal website.
References[edit]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "New Arts and Humanities Faculty". Brown University. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
- ↑ "Program Genres". Literary Arts. Brown University. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
- ↑ "Faculty". Literary Arts. Brown University. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
- ↑ "Writing in 3D". Digital Teaching and Learning. Brown University. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
- ↑ Rothenberg, Jerome; Joris, Pierre (1998). Poems for the Millennium. Volume 2. From Postwar to Millenium. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 827–8. ISBN 978-0-520-20864-3. Search this book on
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 "2001 Poetry Award Winner". Electronic Literature Organization. 2001. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
- ↑ Cayley, John (Fall 1998). "Of Programmatology". Mute: 72–75.
- ↑ Angel, Maria; Gibbs, Anna (2010). "Memory and Motion". In Gendolla, Peter; Schäfer, Jörgen. Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres. Transcript. pp. 100–110. ISBN 9783837612585. Search this book on
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 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.
- ↑ Simanowski, Roberto (2011). Digital Art And Meaning. Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art, and Interactive Installations. University of Minnesota Press. p. 7. ISBN 978-0-8166-6738-3. Search this book on
- ↑ Hayles, N. Katherine (2003). "Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality". The Yale Journal of Criticism. 16 (2): 284–6.
- ↑ Seiça, Alvaro. "setInterval()
Time-Based Readings of Kinetic Poetry". hdl:1956/17267. line feed character in
|title=at position 14 (help) - ↑ Piper, Andrew (2012). Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. location 2092. ISBN 978-0-226-92289-8. Search this book on
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 "John Cayley". ELMCIP Knowledge Base. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
- ↑ Cayley, John. "overboard: an Example of Ambient Time-Based Poetics in Digital Art". Dichtung-digital. 32. Retrieved July 13, 2018.
- ↑ "overboard". programmatology.shadoof.net. Retrieved 2018-07-13.
- ↑ Piper, Andrew (2012). Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. location 2200. ISBN 978-0-226-92289-8. Search this book on
- ↑ 18.0 18.1 "The Readers Project". thereadersproject.org. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
- ↑ Portela, Manuel (2013). Scripting Reading Motions: the Codex and the Computer as Self-Reflexive Machines. Cambridge: MIT Press. p. 346. ISBN 978-0-262-01946-0. Search this book on
- ↑ "YURT, at the Center for Computation and Visualization". web1.ccv.brown.edu. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
- ↑ 21.0 21.1 Cayley, John (2018). "The advent of aurature and the end of (electronic) literature". The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature: 73–94.
- ↑ Cayley, John (2016). "The Listeners: an instance of aurature". Cream City Review. 40 (2): 172–187. doi:10.1353/ccr.2016.0079. Retrieved 9 March 2018.
- ↑ 23.0 23.1 Cayley, John (2018). Grammalepsy: essays on digital language art. New York & London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 9781501335761. Search this book on
- ↑ Simanowski, Roberto (2016). Digital Humanities and Digital Media: Conversations on Politics, Culture, Aesthetics and Literacy. London: Open Humanities Press. pp. 69–92. ISBN 978-1-78542-030-6. Search this book on
- ↑ Cayley, John (September 2007). "Screen Writing: a practice-based, EuroRelative introduction to electronic literature and poetics". Third Text. 21 (5): 603–609.
- ↑ "hanshan.com". Hanshan Tang Books. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
- ↑ Cayley, John (2017-03-11). "Reconfiguration: Symbolic Image and Language Art". Humanities. 6 (1): 8. doi:10.3390/h6010008.
- ↑ Cayley, John. Roberto Simanowski, ed. "Of capta, vectoralists, reading and the Googlization of universities". Digital Humanities and Digital Media: Conversations on Politics, Culture, Aesthetics, and Literacy: 69–92.
- ↑ Cayley, John (2013). "Reading and Giving - Voice and Language". Performance Research. 18 (5): 10–19. doi:10.1080/13528165.2013.828929.
- ↑ Cayley, John (2013). "Terms of reference and Vectoralist transgressions: situating certain literary transactions over networked services". Amodern. 2: n.p. Retrieved 9 March 2018.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Cayley, John (2006). Morris, Adalaide; Swiss, Thomas, eds. "Time code language: new media poetics and programmed signification". New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories: 307–333.
- ↑ 33.0 33.1 "Winners". ELO Prizes. Electronic Literature Organization. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
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