Writing To Be Found In Common Tongues

Creative Performance

John Cayley
Brown University,
Department of Literary Arts

Biography
John Cayley practices digital language arts, and has worked as a poet, translator, publisher, and bookdealer. Links to his writing in networked and programmable media are at http:// programmatology.shadoof.net. Recent and ongoing projects include imposition, riverIsland, what we will, and The Readers Project (http://thereadersproject.org). His last printed book of poems, adaptations and translations was Ink Bamboo (Agenda & Belew, 1996). Cayley was the winner of the Electronic Literature Organization’s Award for Poetry 2001 (http://eliterature.org). He has taught or been associated with a number of universities in the United Kingdom, including the Performance Writing degree at Dartington College of Arts and the Department of English, Royal Holloway College, University of London, where he was an Honorary Research Associate. In the United States, he has taught or directed research at the University of California San Diego and Brown University, where he is now Professor of Literary Arts, with a brief to teach and develop writing in digital media. His most recent work explores ambient poetics in programmable media, writing in immersive artificial audiovisual environments, and aestheticized vectors of reading; with parallel theoretical interventions concerning the role of code, the temporal properties of textuality, and ‘writing to be found’ with/against the services of totalizing statistical models of language.

Abstract
Recently, my work has been concerned with using quasi-algorithmic techniques to generate texts from the natural language processing affordances of so-called network services, such as internet search. For example, I search for short sequences of words and then, from the ‘results’ returned, I collect—as a human reader—some ‘preferred’ longer sequence that contains the sequence originally searched. I then select another short sequence of words from this result and continue, iteratively, to produce ‘writing to be found,’ composed and stitched together into extended pieces of text, substantial passages of words, that I have chosen and ‘composed,’ although they are, in every instance or event of inscription, written by someone or something other than myself. In related engagements, for the seed sequences that supply my searches, I may gather them from a text that was written by another human, from a well-known text, from one that has been ‘authored.’ I may try to find these same short sequences of words, independently and coincidentally ‘authored’ by other humans or other writing processes on the indexed network. I may compose a new, longer text that contains the words of the ‘authored’ supply text within ‘my’ longer sequences that are, however, written by (many) others, as found for me, as retrieved (for me) by the tireless, if electrically-powered, searching and indexing robots of all our internet service providers.