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John Cayley

Brown University, Literary Arts, Faculty Member

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John Cayley is pioneering maker and theorist of language art in programmable media, and Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University. NB: I do not properly maintain my representation in this space (of which I am not sure I approve). I'm better represented currently on Google Scholar and Researchers@Brown.

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Papers by John Cayley

Modelit: eliterature à la (language) mode(l)

Electronic Book Review, 2023

Cayley's image is an apt illustration of an essay that's also a work of 'digital language art.' A... more Cayley's image is an apt illustration of an essay that's also a work of 'digital language art.' Although Cayley incorporates new material and newly contextualized examples, referring chiefly to his own work, what follows is also the reconfigured rewrite of a recent essay for a series of conferences and a peer-reviewed online journal, Political Concepts, which can be found online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Computational art explorations of linguistic possibility spaces: comparative translingual close readings of

Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2023

A code-critical close reading of two related works by Daniel C. Howe. The artist's Automatype is ... more A code-critical close reading of two related works by Daniel C. Howe. The artist's Automatype is an installation that visualizes and sonifies minimal-distance paths between English words and thus explores a possibility space that is relatively familiar to western readers, not only readers of English but also readers of any language which uses Latin letters to compose the orthographic word-level elements of its writing system. In

Postmodern Culture, 1997

Project MUSE promot es t he creat ion and disseminat ion of essent ial humanit ies and social sci... more Project MUSE promot es t he creat ion and disseminat ion of essent ial humanit ies and social science resources t hrough collaborat ion wit h libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a part nership bet ween a universit y press and a library, Project MUSE is a t rust ed part of t he academic and scholarly communit y it serves.

Reading Language Art in Digital Media: Reconfigurations of Experimental Practices

Reading Experimental Writing

This chapter examines recent digital language art through the prism of Johanna Drucker's rece... more This chapter examines recent digital language art through the prism of Johanna Drucker's recent work, combined with a Derridean exploration of 'grammalepsy'. Reading is renegotiated through 'grammaleptic' reading, which is explored in the chapter in relation to reading experimental digital language art. Analyzing contemporary works by Samantha Gorman, Danny Canizzaro, and Dave Jhave Johnston, the chapter yields and understanding of the importance of 'grammaleptic' reading to encountering such works, and to inhabiting a landscape of emerging digital language art.

Reading, writing, resisting: literary appropriation in the readers project

The Readers Project is an aesthetically-oriented system of software entities designed to explore ... more The Readers Project is an aesthetically-oriented system of software entities designed to explore the culture of human reading. These entities, or 'readers', enact specific reading strategies and function as autonomous text generators, networked writing machines visible beyond the texts they 'read'. As the structures on which they operate are culturally implicated, the project's readers shed light on a range of institutional practices surrounding the digital literary and the aggregation of the linguistic commons by corporate interests. In this paper, we present the practical and theoretical considerations guiding the project's development, and consider various strategies to resist the commodification and enclosure of literary culture within the corporate 'cloud'.

Europe studies China : papers from an International Conference on the History of European Sinology

The Readers Project

Under-sky Underground

Grammalepsy: Essays on Digital Language Art by John Cayley

Leonardo, 2019

Untranslatability and Readability

Rather than as a function or inevitable consequence of conventional translation practices (of, fo... more Rather than as a function or inevitable consequence of conventional translation practices (of, for example, some attempt on the 'untranslatable' poem), or as the literary maker's right to refuse the application of such practices, untranslatability is proposed as a special case of unreadability, where the latter is taken to be entailed by all embodiments of language-as-such in particular natural languages or linguistic forms. A thought experiment is described within which mutual unreadability is inscribed in the form of separate monolingual discussions on the same special subject. The discussion is complicated by the proposal that the subject of discussion - in both thought experiment and essay - is that of an actual, Chinese, 'unreadable book,' the artist Xu Bing's (1955- ) Book from the Sky .

Looking Out from Death

Toward a Distributed Gallery in the scholarly network

Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology, 2017

How can we persuade universities to own their responsibilities to the practice-based research tha... more

Writing to Be Found and Writing Readers

Grammalepsy : Essays on Digital Language Art

Grammalepsy: Essays on Digital Language Art, 2018

Collecting and recontextualizing writings from the last twenty years of John Cayley’s research-ba... more Collecting and recontextualizing writings from the last twenty years of John Cayley’s research-based practice of electronic literature, Grammalepsy https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/grammalepsy-essays-on-digital-language-art/ introduces a theory of aesthetic linguistic practice developed specifically for the making and critical appreciation of language art in digital media. As he examines the cultural shift away from traditional print literature and the changes in our culture of reading, Cayley coins the term “grammalepsy” to inform those processes by which we make, understand, and appreciate language. Framing his previous writings within the overall context of this theory, Cayley eschews the tendency of literary critics and writers to reduce aesthetic linguistic making—even when it has multimedia affordances—to “writing.” Instead, Cayley argues that electronic literature and digital language art allow aesthetic language makers to embrace a compositional practice inextricably involved with digital media, which cannot be reduced to print-dependent textuality.

Differences that Make No Difference and Ambiguities that Do

Novel, 2021

Review of: Martin Paul Eve, Close Reading with Computers, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2019

Reconfiguration: Symbolic Image and Language Art

Humanities

'Reconfiguration: Symbolic Image and Language Art' proposes an analytic and theoretical framework... more 'Reconfiguration: Symbolic Image and Language Art' proposes an analytic and theoretical framework for computational aesthetic practices in terms of 'reconfiguration' and its derivatives, 'reconfigurationism' and 'reconfigurationist'. Digitization of the media of aesthetic practices has rendered these practices subject to software architectures derived from computational applications that, for the most part, have had little regard for aesthetics as such. The 'images' of contemporary aesthetic practices are often 'symbolic images' in the terms of the essay. They are co-produced by networked computation and digitized-symbolized-representations of media, all within new formations of ('Big') software architectures that are, typically, beyond the artists' generative, poetic control. Aesthetic practice is configured by software and digitalization. To bring art and aesthetics back into a generative relation with this potentially constrictive not to say totalizing situation, artists must reconfigure. This is an intervention that computation traditionally and productively allows, even in the era of Big Software. Reconfigurationism is demonstrated, specifically, in the field of language art and is also proposed as a poetics, characteristic of a wide range of contemporary aesthetic practice in all media where computation is at play. 'Reconfiguration' and 'reconfigurationism' distinguishes itself from theories of a 'New Aesthetic' and pretends a more insightful and critically generative analysis. The essay's 'symbolic image' bears a relation to Vilém Flusser's 'technical image' but has a clearer relation both to language and to computation, since Flusser's term is overweening with regard to (the end of the history of) language and overdetermined by its links to apparatus as opposed to the generalized abstractions of computation.

Hallucination and Coherence

Positions East Asia Cultures Critique, 2002

... After finishing and considering his reading of Huang Yunte's recently pub-lished transla... more

Language Shattered: Contemporary Chinese Poetry and Duoduo. By Maghiel van Crevel. [Leiden: Research School CNWS, 1996. xi + 355 pp. DF1.40.00. ISBN 90-73782-52-X.]

Chin Quart, 1997

The Listeners: an instance of aurature

Cream City Review

Aurature at the End(s) of Electronic Literature

Means and ends. Within the very phrase 'electronic literature' its ends are implicated in its mea... more Means and ends. Within the very phrase 'electronic literature' its ends are implicated in its means. 'Electronic' refers to means in a way that is well understood but promotes quite specific means as the essential attribute of a cultural phenomenon, a phenomenon that was once new, a new kind of literature, a new teleology for literary practice, an 'end' of literature having its own ends, the end of electronic literature in its means, ends justified by means. This brief essay will not remain bound up within the conceptual entanglements of a name. 1 We will move on from 'end(s)' to means, to media, and finally -as we shall see -to medium. 2 We understand that 'electronic' in 'electronic literature' -now indisputably one end of a field of serious play for the theory and practice of literature -refers metonymically to computation and all its infrastructure: hardware, software, interface & interaction design, networking, and today also, since at least the mid 2000s, to a particular de facto historically-created world built from all of this infrastructure within which most of us now 'live' for a considerable portion of our lives, our cultural and, predominantly, our commercially implicated, transactional lives.

Modelit: eliterature à la (language) mode(l)

Electronic Book Review, 2023

Cayley's image is an apt illustration of an essay that's also a work of 'digital language art.' A... more Cayley's image is an apt illustration of an essay that's also a work of 'digital language art.' Although Cayley incorporates new material and newly contextualized examples, referring chiefly to his own work, what follows is also the reconfigured rewrite of a recent essay for a series of conferences and a peer-reviewed online journal, Political Concepts, which can be found online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Computational art explorations of linguistic possibility spaces: comparative translingual close readings of

Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2023

A code-critical close reading of two related works by Daniel C. Howe. The artist's Automatype is ... more A code-critical close reading of two related works by Daniel C. Howe. The artist's Automatype is an installation that visualizes and sonifies minimal-distance paths between English words and thus explores a possibility space that is relatively familiar to western readers, not only readers of English but also readers of any language which uses Latin letters to compose the orthographic word-level elements of its writing system. In

Postmodern Culture, 1997

Project MUSE promot es t he creat ion and disseminat ion of essent ial humanit ies and social sci... more Project MUSE promot es t he creat ion and disseminat ion of essent ial humanit ies and social science resources t hrough collaborat ion wit h libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a part nership bet ween a universit y press and a library, Project MUSE is a t rust ed part of t he academic and scholarly communit y it serves.

Reading Language Art in Digital Media: Reconfigurations of Experimental Practices

Reading Experimental Writing

This chapter examines recent digital language art through the prism of Johanna Drucker's rece... more This chapter examines recent digital language art through the prism of Johanna Drucker's recent work, combined with a Derridean exploration of 'grammalepsy'. Reading is renegotiated through 'grammaleptic' reading, which is explored in the chapter in relation to reading experimental digital language art. Analyzing contemporary works by Samantha Gorman, Danny Canizzaro, and Dave Jhave Johnston, the chapter yields and understanding of the importance of 'grammaleptic' reading to encountering such works, and to inhabiting a landscape of emerging digital language art.

Reading, writing, resisting: literary appropriation in the readers project

The Readers Project is an aesthetically-oriented system of software entities designed to explore ... more The Readers Project is an aesthetically-oriented system of software entities designed to explore the culture of human reading. These entities, or 'readers', enact specific reading strategies and function as autonomous text generators, networked writing machines visible beyond the texts they 'read'. As the structures on which they operate are culturally implicated, the project's readers shed light on a range of institutional practices surrounding the digital literary and the aggregation of the linguistic commons by corporate interests. In this paper, we present the practical and theoretical considerations guiding the project's development, and consider various strategies to resist the commodification and enclosure of literary culture within the corporate 'cloud'.

Europe studies China : papers from an International Conference on the History of European Sinology

The Readers Project

Under-sky Underground

Grammalepsy: Essays on Digital Language Art by John Cayley

Leonardo, 2019

Untranslatability and Readability

Rather than as a function or inevitable consequence of conventional translation practices (of, fo... more Rather than as a function or inevitable consequence of conventional translation practices (of, for example, some attempt on the 'untranslatable' poem), or as the literary maker's right to refuse the application of such practices, untranslatability is proposed as a special case of unreadability, where the latter is taken to be entailed by all embodiments of language-as-such in particular natural languages or linguistic forms. A thought experiment is described within which mutual unreadability is inscribed in the form of separate monolingual discussions on the same special subject. The discussion is complicated by the proposal that the subject of discussion - in both thought experiment and essay - is that of an actual, Chinese, 'unreadable book,' the artist Xu Bing's (1955- ) Book from the Sky .

Looking Out from Death

Toward a Distributed Gallery in the scholarly network

Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology, 2017

How can we persuade universities to own their responsibilities to the practice-based research tha... more

Writing to Be Found and Writing Readers

Grammalepsy : Essays on Digital Language Art

Grammalepsy: Essays on Digital Language Art, 2018

Collecting and recontextualizing writings from the last twenty years of John Cayley’s research-ba... more Collecting and recontextualizing writings from the last twenty years of John Cayley’s research-based practice of electronic literature, Grammalepsy https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/grammalepsy-essays-on-digital-language-art/ introduces a theory of aesthetic linguistic practice developed specifically for the making and critical appreciation of language art in digital media. As he examines the cultural shift away from traditional print literature and the changes in our culture of reading, Cayley coins the term “grammalepsy” to inform those processes by which we make, understand, and appreciate language. Framing his previous writings within the overall context of this theory, Cayley eschews the tendency of literary critics and writers to reduce aesthetic linguistic making—even when it has multimedia affordances—to “writing.” Instead, Cayley argues that electronic literature and digital language art allow aesthetic language makers to embrace a compositional practice inextricably involved with digital media, which cannot be reduced to print-dependent textuality.

Differences that Make No Difference and Ambiguities that Do

Novel, 2021

Review of: Martin Paul Eve, Close Reading with Computers, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2019

Reconfiguration: Symbolic Image and Language Art

Humanities

'Reconfiguration: Symbolic Image and Language Art' proposes an analytic and theoretical framework... more 'Reconfiguration: Symbolic Image and Language Art' proposes an analytic and theoretical framework for computational aesthetic practices in terms of 'reconfiguration' and its derivatives, 'reconfigurationism' and 'reconfigurationist'. Digitization of the media of aesthetic practices has rendered these practices subject to software architectures derived from computational applications that, for the most part, have had little regard for aesthetics as such. The 'images' of contemporary aesthetic practices are often 'symbolic images' in the terms of the essay. They are co-produced by networked computation and digitized-symbolized-representations of media, all within new formations of ('Big') software architectures that are, typically, beyond the artists' generative, poetic control. Aesthetic practice is configured by software and digitalization. To bring art and aesthetics back into a generative relation with this potentially constrictive not to say totalizing situation, artists must reconfigure. This is an intervention that computation traditionally and productively allows, even in the era of Big Software. Reconfigurationism is demonstrated, specifically, in the field of language art and is also proposed as a poetics, characteristic of a wide range of contemporary aesthetic practice in all media where computation is at play. 'Reconfiguration' and 'reconfigurationism' distinguishes itself from theories of a 'New Aesthetic' and pretends a more insightful and critically generative analysis. The essay's 'symbolic image' bears a relation to Vilém Flusser's 'technical image' but has a clearer relation both to language and to computation, since Flusser's term is overweening with regard to (the end of the history of) language and overdetermined by its links to apparatus as opposed to the generalized abstractions of computation.

Hallucination and Coherence

Positions East Asia Cultures Critique, 2002

... After finishing and considering his reading of Huang Yunte's recently pub-lished transla... more

Language Shattered: Contemporary Chinese Poetry and Duoduo. By Maghiel van Crevel. [Leiden: Research School CNWS, 1996. xi + 355 pp. DF1.40.00. ISBN 90-73782-52-X.]

Chin Quart, 1997

The Listeners: an instance of aurature

Cream City Review

Aurature at the End(s) of Electronic Literature

Means and ends. Within the very phrase 'electronic literature' its ends are implicated in its mea... more Means and ends. Within the very phrase 'electronic literature' its ends are implicated in its means. 'Electronic' refers to means in a way that is well understood but promotes quite specific means as the essential attribute of a cultural phenomenon, a phenomenon that was once new, a new kind of literature, a new teleology for literary practice, an 'end' of literature having its own ends, the end of electronic literature in its means, ends justified by means. This brief essay will not remain bound up within the conceptual entanglements of a name. 1 We will move on from 'end(s)' to means, to media, and finally -as we shall see -to medium. 2 We understand that 'electronic' in 'electronic literature' -now indisputably one end of a field of serious play for the theory and practice of literature -refers metonymically to computation and all its infrastructure: hardware, software, interface & interaction design, networking, and today also, since at least the mid 2000s, to a particular de facto historically-created world built from all of this infrastructure within which most of us now 'live' for a considerable portion of our lives, our cultural and, predominantly, our commercially implicated, transactional lives.