John Cayley | |
---|---|
Born | John Cayley July 20, 1956 |
Known for | Digital Language Art, Poetry, Translation, Electronic Literature |
Notable work | windsound, riverIsland, translation, Image Generation, The Listeners, The Readers Project, Grammalepsy |
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]
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]
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]
John Cayley | |
---|---|
Born | John Cayley July 20, 1956 |
Known for | Digital Language Art, Poetry, Translation, Electronic Literature |
Notable work | windsound, riverIsland, translation, Image Generation, The Listeners, The Readers Project, Grammalepsy |
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]
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]
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]