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).
[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.
[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.
[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.'
[11] Cayley's most recent work explores transactive synthetic language and led to his creation of a skill for the Amazon Echo, The Listeners.