Poet Ray'd Yo: an Interview with John Cayley and Chris Funkhauser

Poet Ray’d Yo 69

24 June 2021

[ Program begins with a recording of Cayley’s “To Be With You”.]

[unedited/unformatted transcript] ¹

Therefore, pleasure and pain, no duration, is desire or appetite. The formula, insofar as it is expressed or diminished, is to be seen or checked by external choices. That is, it is each individual’s very nature, and which washes the foundations of our plans. So each individual’s pleasure or pain differs from one approaches to the next.

Dear children, I consider the reason that I am with you. I think you, you love me too much just to help. I think you understand particular performance in depth, you’re supposed to, and thereby gain insight into the conventions of current performance in general. Hello, Tracy. To that end, it is a pleasure to be graced by your presence and to bask.

Hello Harlequin. Nice to meet you too. I was always told. So gradual are these seasonal variations, that the lake always appears to be an eternally unique being, even though in fact it is always a children, and as a result it is not existential or actual, but never fall. This is the distinction between the variety of the exaltation vanishes.

Consumption, fuel, the weighting is a tool realized in the sublime. The feeling of the sublime is a pleasure that arises only in interviewing your new baby.

Funkhouser: Good evening, comrades, and welcome to the June 2021 edition of Poet Ray’d Yo on WGXC. We are in the middle of our summer 2021 Back to the Studio pledge drive, and are looking to add new sustaining supporters to reach our goal of securing enough funds to keep the station going in the long term. If you’re not already one of WGXC’s supporters, please head over to wgxc.org/donate to make a pledge or become a sustaining member. We will greatly appreciate anything you have to give. My name is Chris, and tonight’s guest is John Cayley, whose work as a digital and cross-disciplinary artist includes practicing Chinese translation, computer programming, and creating poetry. He’s also a musician and a professor in the Literary Arts program at Brown University. I first encountered John’s work in the mid-90s when he was making interesting animated poetry with Apple’s HyperCard software. Since then, he has produced dozens of poetic works using programmable media and has written an important critical monograph, Grammalepsy: essays on digital language art.

John’s website, P=R=O=G=R=A=M=M=A=T=O=L=O=G=Y, that’s programatology.com, is full of his online artworks, essays, and information about his various practices. John works with language on a granular level, sometimes processing it at the level of phonemes. I’ve been fascinated and inspired by his work for a long time, and I’m very pleased to have him on the program. Welcome, John.

Cayley: Chris, it’s great to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Funkhouser: So, John, we started the program by playing this mp3 that you sent me called “To Be With You”, and it’s a sound poem. Speaking a few days ago, you said some of your primary interests at this point were with audio. I thought it would sound good on the radio, and I also thought it would be good to play because it’s not entirely indicative of the type of work that you’ve done. I understand it was made by processing phrases with internet fragments. I was wondering if we could talk about that for a minute. It’s really a cool aesthetic there.

Cayley: Sure, absolutely. So that piece starts with me having basically composed a short text, “Insofar as I am with you, it is a pleasure”. Those are the basic sentiments of the piece. I took phrases from that text and searched for them on the Internet, and I gathered the fragments that included those phrases and then stitched them together using a method I call Loose Linking. For the same phrases, I did it three times. So, I had three different texts, but they all shared the words of the original composed text. Then, with my rather meager audio editing skills, I overlaid and aligned them such that the shared phrases match up. So, they ‘chime’ as you listen to the piece, and if you listen to the chimes, you’ll just be listening to the original composed piece, and then you hear in the background parts of the fragments that included those phrases overlaid and interwoven, as it were. A bit of a one-off for me.

Funkhouser: Was this done recently? I didn’t see a date on that.

Cayley: No, it was done some time ago. It was when I was still in the phase of my work, which I called “writing to be found”, when I was doing a lot of collaging of internet text. And then that segued into the “to be with You” pieces and eventually led to the work that I did for the Amazon Echo devices, Alexa.

Funkhouser: So, it predates your Alexa work.

Cayley: Yeah.

Funkhouser: That’s interesting.

Cayley: I’m also interested in these things I call longest common phrases, where you have a piece of writing, and if you start searching for one or two words, and then three words, and then four words, and five words, at a certain point, you’ll find that the phrase is unique: You don’t get any hits.

And typically, if it’s English your searching, that’ll be at five or six words. But for anything shorter than that, just two or three or four words, you’ll find other fragments of language that have used those four words that aren’t yours.

Funkhouser: That’s right. That’s right.

Cayley: So, they’re part of the commons of language. I was very keen on creating texts based on those principles, such that they stay in the commons.

Funkhouser: It’s like an expanded version of the thing that Hugh Kenner and Charles Hartman were working with, the level of the letter, right? Two-character grams and whatever. You’re working on the level of the word.

Cayley: Absolutely.

Funkhouser: I was looking through Grammalepsy last night, and I had forgotten that you had taken up Flarf a bit in there. But here I’m hearing about this work, and I realize there is a vague connection with Flarf, right? If you’re pulling phrases off the internet, obviously, you’re not sculpting in the way that the Flarfists did. But are you using a Google API, or how does that work?

Cayley: Yeah, I love Flarf and much of the work I’ve done in the past, and that I still do, is Flarf-like in its process, but it’s not really Flarf in the same way, because I’m not so much interested in the abjection or the humor or those kind of aspects.

Funkhouser: The terribleness.

Cayley: Sometimes I’m interested in being deliberately terrible, but not necessarily. But I am very interested in the boundary between composition and just finding, discovering. An internet search allows you to discover so much in the way of sequences of language.

Funkhouser: The algorithm is really the responsible thing. You remove all the subjectivity, right? Because a Flarfist is picking out phrases and leaving some behind and then sculpting accordingly, but with you, your work here, it’s very deliberate.

Cayley: Yeah, it varies. It can be. Some of the stuff I’ve done is completely algorithmically generated, with just pure quasi-randomness. But for the Loose Links and the piece you began with, I chose which of the internet fragments to use. With the Loose Links, I do the same; you get several possible searches, searches that qualify---they have the phrase in it that you want---but I choose which of them to continue with. So, as there is for Flarf, there is the intervention of somebody who’s composing.

Just to answer the question that you brought up before, I do use APIs, and I also have deliberately misused APIs. Because Google doesn’t want you to do a lot of searches that are not for information or are not commercial. So, if you do a lot, they try to stop you. And it’s nice to give them a little bit of trouble with these restrictions.

Funkhouser: And it turns out well. What language, coding language, is involved here?

Cayley: I used to be using Java, together with my main coding collaborator---coding and language art collaborator---Daniel C. Howe. These days, I like to stick with what I think of as the Web technologies. I use JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to make my things.

Funkhouser: And you can do all that. Wow…

Cayley: Yeah, you can do anything with those three these days.

Funkhouser: Students this past semester were showing me things that they were doing with CSS that I just couldn’t believe. I was like, really? It’s come a long way.

Cayley: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve just been learning much more about CSS. It is wonderful. It would allow, if poetic practitioners got into it, off the shelf, it would allow poetic practitioners to do some very interesting dynamic effects if they wanted to.

Funkhouser: When I was introducing you, I mentioned your website, and that also makes me think of the current work of yours I’ve seen on the internet. On the website, you have this animation on the homepage of Programmatology. It’s a poem by Liu Zongyuan, is that how you pronounce his name?

Cayley: Liu Zongyuan, yes. ²

Funkhouser: This is a little bit reminiscent of a piece of yours that’s up on this new website called The LAOB. You had a piece there, I noticed, it’s called, “While Wishing This Was Someone Else’s Dream.” These are a little different than your previously processed work in that there seems to be a linearity to it. However, you’re doing different delays with the rendition of the text. I got into the piece on your website, and then I was also studying The LAOB piece. First, I was convinced that the text was changing subtly.

Then I realized that it isn’t changing, but the way I’m reading it changes because of the different patterns and the erasures, and seeing parts of the poem at once. I thought it’d be interesting to talk about that a little bit with you. I really was moved by the animation on your homepage, and I felt---it made me realize that with algorithmically generated compositions, the more you sit with something like these pieces I’ve mentioned, the more you get out of it, right? It can’t be viewed and digested instantly. It goes against the grain of the Internet that way.

Cayley: Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity to talk about this work. It’s exciting for me to do so in some ways because it’s a throwback to what I began with. When I was getting into computers, personal computers, and poetry, basically, it seemed to me obvious that we should be able to score the typography of a poem. And I had a phrase for this, which was “scoring the spelt air.” I still like it as a phrase. And I was sure that if I didn’t do it, somebody would eventually come up with an easy sort of programmatic.

A suite that would allow me just to choose a poem arbitrarily and make its words appear wherever I wanted on the screen, according to whatever timings I wanted. Never happened. Still can’t really understand this. I can’t point a student to such a thing. It should exist, but it doesn’t.

Funkhouser: I’m thinking of works like Brian Kim Stefan’s “The Dream Life of Letters”. This is not quite the same thing you’re talking about, right?

Cayley: It’s not quite the same thing. I did this myself way, way back. I did a piece called Wine Flying. Which was in HyperCard, in HyperTalk. That was scored very similarly to the way the one that you’ve pointed out on my website is scored. Recently, the Internet Archive made it possible to put HyperCard stacks up in an emulator that makes them work, so all this was on my mind. Then I discovered this platform on the Internet called Observable, observablehq.com, that allows you to code in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS with no installation. You can just start writing. All you have to have is a browser and a connection, and you can start coding. That was very exciting. It was almost like HyperCard had returned. Ordinary people could just start to code. And so, I thought I would revisit and try to score the Spelt Air project on this new platform. What you’re looking at when you open my webpage is an animated poem that is being driven live by the code that is in a notebook on observablehq.com. I happen to think it’s really cool that you’ve got a notebook that explains how it, itself, works, and it’s driving, live, the reader-facing front page of a website somewhere. And that is what theLAOB.com, The Language Art Observer, is: a platform I’m developing that will allow, I hope, many people to do the same sort of thing. So that’s what that is.

Funkhouser: It’s a database of words, and then you plot them in a temporal sequence?

Cayley: It’s more the case that you’ve got your poem, then you make the beautiful poetic animation through which you want somebody to read it, you’ve made it in the way you want it to be read. And the engine, the running code for what you wanted, exists on another site where the code is all annotated with explanations and notes. This actual notebook is generating your beautiful front page. So yeah, there could be a database, there could be anything on the back end. The back end could be anything that the web can do. It’s just that you can also have this aestheticized front page that a poet or a critic might want to read.

Funkhouser: So, you’re also responsible for the patterns, right?

Cayley: Yes.

Funkhouser: It seems like this eventually goes on in a kind of a loop.

Cayley: Yes.

Funkhouser: This piece in particular, when it goes through laying all the words out and taking them out and then removing them and then putting certain ones back in, and then when I’m left with the word snow at the very end, I’m left with the snow and the calligraphy. Then all of a sudden, I’m connecting the snow and the calligraphy, et cetera, et cetera. I thought there was an odd intimacy to that, and it also accomplishes this contemplative type of effect through poetry.

Cayley: Yeah. In that piece, I’m working with Chinese poetics, classical Chinese poetics, and the different readings of the poem are indicative of the structure of the original poem. So, it’s creative in the sense that I did the translation. It is a “word-for-character translation.” And it’s a little bit out there in terms of word choice. But yes, all the effects that you’ve just described are intended, but they’re achieved in a relatively simple way, just by using and revealing actually existing poetic structures.

The other thing that I want to talk about is that the timing of the appearance of the words is an exact—an algorithmically transcribed representation—of the pace at which I want those phrases to be read, and at which I actually read them. This is the same for “While Wishing This Was Someone Else’s Dream,” in that the words are appearing at the timings of an actual vocal reading of the poem. Linearly, yes, but it’s my reading. It’s my performance of that poem. These days, you can get software, which is normally used for something they call “video alignment.” Somebody, say, has done an instructional video and they want to index it to a voiceover, and they need the timings so that they can edit the video quickly according to the voiceover. And the alignment data may be at the phoneme level. So, if you can get this data, you can get more or less perfect time stamps. At the moment, that’s what I’m working on. It’s what I’m finding very cool. You started, Chris, by saying absolutely correctly that these days I’m into the aurality of my work— that’s “A-U” aurality—as much as its visuality on page or screen. And that’s true. When you look at the poem on my website or at “While Wishing This Was Someone Else’s Dream,” you’re getting the rhythm of my actual voice. And although you’re seeing it, you’re experiencing, in time, the rhythm of my voice, which, again, I think is interesting. And it’s the sort of thing that other poets, in theory, should be interested in.

Funkhouser: Maybe now would be a good time to hear a reading in your own voice from one of these poems, like “While Wishing This Was Someone Else’s Dream”, and let’s see how that goes.

Cayley: Yeah, let’s see how it goes. So, I’m going to read it off the screen. And I think that your listeners will just hear me reading a poem. Which is absolutely great, and then if they went to the site, to theLAOB.com, and scrolled down and clicked it, they would be able to see it, and they could even rewind and watch it at the same time. Anyway, here we go, shall we? “While Wishing This Was Someone Else’s Dream.”

I am an
	old man

	in the note
			you left me
	I read
	and
	hear

that this is the last time
						for flowers
my own last time

				for the luxury of flowers

this is the last time that
		I will open the French doors

the last time
		that I will pass
					and return
		over their threshold

this is my last time

					to walk at night 		in the garden

my last time
		to gaze into the pool
this is my last time
			to drown
		in the moon
					's reflection
or to follow its path
				on the water

this is the last time that
					I will return
			this way
					to where we sleep
			together

these are
		my last times

and no

	return
to beautiful, to
		my or to this
							last
					one, to
							tranquil, or yet to

wrong, to
	times	
	all utter
			'd living time's im
	providence

and no, no

	return to un
returning, to tell
				no,

to tell no
			one

the last or just
				my own
return

	to
		no one

Cayley: That’s it.

Funkhouser: I was watching along. I was reading along. It was not quite like those little things you would see on the TV with the ball that bounced from word to word, because I was slightly off. I started it maybe just a little bit before you started reading. That was interesting, and I was wondering if there’s a different computer processor, would the speed be different?

Cayley: It shouldn’t be, no, it shouldn’t be.

Funkhouser: It seemed like when I was just watching this unfurl on the screen and listening to your voice, I don’t know, it’s gotta be tough to read like that, John.

Cayley: I was reading it from the animation.

Funkhouser: I got that, but it wasn’t quite syncing up, is what I’m saying.

Cayley: Right, yeah. If you’re watching the animation, it’s out of sync with mine³. You started the reading on your browser at a different time, and with Internet lag and whatnot, a number of things could be going on. Although, one of the things I’ve experimented with is to deliberately desync the actual reading, which is, of course, recorded, from the animation. But I haven’t found the best way to do this yet. I think that you could get some effects—in the way that you talked about how the fading in and fading out produces non-linear, multiple readings—I think that a carefully orchestrated arrangement of the visual animation and audible performance could produce some fascinating effects.

Funkhouser: Yeah. I could hear it. If you had different people recording it in different places it’s like it was a sort of strange chorale effect or something like that. Yeah, so the text there, is that part of a Loose Link generation, or is that just straight-up writing?

Cayley: That is straight-up writing, and it’s basically a sort of occasional poem that I wrote. One of the nice things about this Observable platform is that if somebody wants to, they can go back and look at the notebook, and in the notebook, there’s an explanation. It explains where the poem comes from, why I wrote it, and this seems like a nice thing also. And this one’s basically an occasional poem.

Funkhouser: All right. Well, I do hope that the listeners will go take a look at it because you can’t quite describe the effect of the way that the timings and everything there work.

I want to pause here for a second to remind listeners, in fact, that they are in tune with Poet Ray’d Yo on WGXC. We are in the middle of our summer 2021 Back to the Studio pledge drive and are seeking donations and trying to obtain new sustaining supporters. If you’re in a position to help us out, please head over to wgxc.org/donate to make a pledge. My guest today on Poet Ray’d Yo is John Cayley. We’ve been talking about his work with poetry and digital media. John, I think I’d like to play another recording that you provided, which has got the title, “Basic Idea”. And again, it’s part of this micro collage series, right?

Cayley: Yeah.

Funkhouser: Do you want to say anything about this? Because we’ll play a bit of this recording, and then have you read a piece that’s similar, based on the same methods.

Cayley: Sounds good, yeah. Just to quickly say something about them, this was part of the work that I, as I said before, was pursuing called “Writing to be Found”. Each of these pieces starts with a four-word phrase. I search for this phrase, and then I find a number of results that contain language that includes the four-word phrase. Then I pick another four-word phrase that’s in the chosen result, and I use this for my next search. When I find one that I like, and that I think will join up nicely, I join it, I solder it on, or I weld it on, at the point of a four-word phrase. Because the four-word phrase exists in both the initial result and the second result—and same process for subsequent results—each four-word phrase guarantees a degree of syntactic continuity. Depending on which results I choose, you get a sort of a rambling story that that links up syntactically, but it’s basically just what I happen to be rambling along and finding on the Internet text. So that’s what you’re hearing when you hear the recording.

Funkhouser: Is there any editing done to this, or is it always just straight output?

Cayley: The editing is done at the time of the search results. So, once I’ve found my research results and used the four-word phrase to weld the pieces together, my editing job is done. I just keep going, and then I decide when to stop.

Funkhouser: It always works out to your liking or to your satisfaction?

Cayley: Let’s just say, at the time, I did three of them and liked all of them. And I’ve used this technique in slightly variant forms when it’s produced even more interesting results. So yes, that’s kind of cool. For each four-word phrase search, I might get ten results, so I look at the language that is around the forward phrase, and if I like it, and I think it goes with the previous piece, then that’s the one I’m going to pick. So, at this level, there’s the intervention of writing, a human mind, at a certain point, or sorry … a writing human body.

Funkhouser: So, you are doing that in real time. You’re watching the output and then making selections.

Cayley: Yeah.

Funkhouser: Alright. So, let’s hear some of the prerecorded, and then we’ll hear you read some also. ⁴

But the basic idea remains the same: spread out your weight and walk on snow. Modern snowshoes let you do it all from the shadows. Somehow you manage to perturb and puzzle those around you like no other being on earth can. But above all, use your intuition. Never use an invocation or convocation that contains words you do not know. In this case, write the words down as you confront them and find out why this is happening. Be careful here, don’t misinterpret signals that are coming from people around the world. English is not always their first language, so there are errors in omission, there are errors because of poor communication, there is the ever-present threat that the region could stumble into war as a result of the (unintended) consequences of the government’s actions. The ultimate goal of this work is to identify the best way to stop terrorist acts. You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you. None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear. Les avions sont des jouets intéressants mais n’ont aucune utilité militaire. Airplanes are interesting toys, but of no military value.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were heavily industrial. Where did the atomic bombs hit? Military targets, like the blasted roads, bridges, trucks, railroad tracks and rolling stock which I saw. Although I was not shown any of their inhabitants. The journey in this dimension continued for about three hours, after which time I was deposited back into my physical body from below like coming out of the earth and into myself, then I shot straight up and opened my eyes to find I couldn’t move and something clear kept hovering in and out of me in a wave that drowns me over and over again until I cannot breathe for you, or you for me; I must breathe for myself, and you for yourself. We are distinct persons, and are each equally provided with faculties necessary to our individual existence. In leaving you, I took nothing but what belonged to me, and in no way looked back. So, the lesson learned is that if you cannot even recycle an idea, you’ll in no way be able to recycle copy, which is far more granular. Therefore, it makes no sense to assume that everyone could be wrong about the appropriateness of a gesture. Or, to take another example. When everybody sees the handcuffs you see her looking quite nervous in the background. I loved little things like that. Ah, but those are the things I miss the most. The little idiosyncrasies that only I knew about. That’s what made her so special. I’d walk out of the house to get the mail only to return a few minutes later when things seemed safe, all the while knowing that it is empty, and that all is silent again. For the first time, his gaze travelled down his body. He took a wondering look at his treated wounds, especially the cast on his arm and his shoulder-blade. And while he lay thus wedged in between two heavy beams he heard others beneath him giving way to the agony of despair. His only solace: friends in the espionage business tell him the murderer is dead. His relatives have been arrested, including several of his brothers, and children in the family have been interrogated about his whereabouts, for obvious reasons. His own fear had been the worst night of his life; he had been scared to death by sixteen dreams; and he was desperate to find out their meanings in the house where dreams came up only to come crashing down.

Funkhouser: So, what was the occasion for the making the recordings?

Cayley: Oh, I can’t remember. I think it was just one of those moments where I said to myself, oh, I could do this and it’ll probably be interesting, and then did it. At the time, I was also interested in audio recording. As you heard in the recorded sample, I pitch-shifted my voice down by a semitone, which makes it sound a little bit portentous and artificial. And I liked that very much.

Funkhouser: Do you have something from the series that we can hear now?

Cayley: Okay. So now I’m just going to read something else from the Loose Links. This one is called, “I Had a Visit Today.” ⁵

I had a visit today, for monitoring, from almost the only group that ever comes to me, rather than me going to them. I needed to make it about them and their needs, not about me and my needs. I needed a new atmosphere, a new environment, and I found it and I’m extremely excited and happy: people with bipolar disorder will have a mixture of negative and positive feeling all at the same time, and in time, and in your own time, etc. What I want to know is the following: Is there a context where the fresh air seems to be almost already used up. This is why I believe in the discipline of travel. It does something to the soul that no other activity can touch. It stretches your mind and perspective in new and creative ways each day. Within you there is immense pressure not to do it and you need a lot of self-confidence to actually do it. Life is very bloody hard. I actually think living is harder than dying, and I try to live my life by bringing to my consciousness what is bubbling up from my unconsciousness. Simply find some snow and make it into a ball. If you keep rolling, you can roll it into a nice ball. Of course, as soon as you stop rolling, it will ooze and turn back into a puddle. Bounce it. If you need to adjust the green locator bars, change them until the loop plays back smoothly and continuously without stutters or glitches.

You’ll also need to make sure you maintain an accurate bearing. First, you should find a suitable target in the video image. As you drag it, you’ll see the area around it magnified, as well as the magnified area, but it doesn’t take into account the scale, so this needs to be adjusted. But the basic idea remains the same:

Funkhouser: It does move along quite well.

Cayley: And you see I came back to the “basic idea.” I should do more of these things. I really should think about them more.

Funkhouser: There’s another work that’s up there on The LAOB site, which is called “Shimmer”.⁶ How does that fit into all of this?

Cayley: As everybody will be well aware by now, my work is all over the place, formally. “Shimmer” is something that I think of as a dynamic concrete poem, or a dynamic visual poem. The text underlying it is a short piece—you might think of it as a short prose poem—and the manipulation that is done on the piece, the shimmering, is a matter of substituting certain letters. Specifically, for this one, there are only three lowercase letter replacements. E’s can replace O’s, and vice versa, N’s can replace R’s, and vice versa, and T’s can replace F’s, and vice versa. Because those are letters that are graphically most similar. And they are paired as vowels or

consonants. E with O. T is a consonant, and F is a consonant, and, in lowercase, they look very similar. The difference between the letters is less than a whole letter. It’s just a matter of a stroke or two, or a single stroke, or less, even. All that “Shimmer” does is oscillate. In one state, it’s smoothing out. It’s as if the surface of a piece of water is less ruffled by the wind and is becoming smooth. As it does, you can read its reflections more easily. You can read the words as normal words. You can see what they are. Then the water is perturbed again. The wind, the breeze picks up, and the image begins to shimmer. The words are basically keeping their shape, but they’re shimmering because of these minor letter changes. And because the letter changes are minimal, in theory, you can still read the shimmering form.

Funkhouser: You can sort of read it.

Cayley: You can sort of read it.

Funkhouser: It reminds me of some of the work you were doing, 15 years plus ago, when we were cycling between languages, because I’m seeing almost like old English here, and I don’t know, different languages. Even some of these words, “tnom”, I don’t know where that line comes from, and then think about your constraints and it’s “from”, but then it’s “tnem”. And then it shifts, it’s cycling through in a very interesting way. How often do you try to read or perform a work like this?

Cayley: To be honest, this work, although I’ve thought about how to sonify it, as it were, this one is not meant for reading out loud.

Funkhouser: I think it’s good for the readers to know about the variety and the diversity of the type of animation and animated works that you do. So again, this is on The LAOB. You were talking earlier about addressing language on the level of the phoneme. This does that. Does every single word in this piece eventually change?

Cayley: Yes, they all change. Every word is subject to the letter replacements. It’s all very carefully done. And just in case you’re interested, or your listeners are interested, and they look at it, it’s supposed to be almost like a representational piece, like a figurative piece. You’re supposed to imagine yourself doing what is happening there. The moor is at my back, the moor, like a piece of land. In front of me is a lake. There’s a lake in front of me, and then the moon, across the lake. And then under the

evergreens of the farther shore, there’s the reflection of the moon that spreads out toward me. The text is doing that. The text is the reflection of the moon in the water. So, when the water is still, you see the moon and its reflection quite clearly and smoothly. Or, as it says, roughened. “A surface must / be smooth to reflect or see through. / deformations elongate, compress, and interweave. So that’s like what happens with the moon in ripples, when “Roughened edges / literally catch the light.” “Embrace the Moon” is a reference to the famous poem by Li Bo, who got drunk and tried to embrace the reflection of the moon in the water and fell in.⁷

Funkhouser: That’s so sophisticated and refined, John. I’m looking at this now, and I’m thinking of bp nichol and First Screening and how he was doing these types of representational poems on the Apple in the 1980s or something? But this is something. I’m really glad that I asked you about it, just because it got my attention. This is new work, right?

Cayley: Yeah. This is new.

Funkhouser: It’s fascinating. We are running a little bit towards the end of the program here, and because I think it’s so interesting, I do want to spend some time talking about your work with Alexa. When did you start working with Alexa?

Cayley: I think it’s 2014 where it actually starts, and then version two, maybe something like 2016, but it’s still going. The Listeners was one of the first user-programmed pieces that Amazon let out there into what became this rather expanded space for what they call “skills.” Skills are basically apps for Alexa in the world of Amazon’s digital assistants.

Funkhouser: Why don’t you describe in brief, to the audience, what this is about, so they know what they’re getting into, the progression? Maybe say a bit about why you’re doing it, because I remember being so surprised that your work turned to this, not because it was audio or interactive audio, that much I understood, but then working with this corporate tool, which can be read in certain ways as surveillance. You had a response to that. We talked about it, so maybe you could just…

Cayley: The fundamental justification for it is that the relationship of language, as it is mostly practiced by humans, and the relationship between

Language and computers, were radically shifted when these digital assistants were brought out, and this will continue into the future. More and more, we will be talking to devices, and they will be listening to us. I thought this was going to happen when it first started to happen, and it is happening, and it’s becoming more and more common. This is, I think, a profound shift. What you’ve got here is, you’ve got robust, usable voice recognition and robust, plausible text-to-speech. That’s what’s happening, that’s what’s driving it.

This was available when I started, and it’s become better and better over time. And it’s very scary. And it’s very important. And it does involve surveillance on a mass scale. And it does involve capturing people’s voices on a mass scale, anonymizing them, and using the data. But the fact of all this doesn’t mean that artists, practitioners, activists, and critics, shouldn’t be in there and intervening. It is incumbent upon them to be doing so. It may make you complicit, but you are already complicit. These days, I say, “Get over it.” And also, “Do it while you can.” Because you might get locked out sooner than you think. I’m surprised that The Listeners has been allowed to exist for as long as it has. Now and then, I have to put it up for re-approval. It’s quite popular. It’s been surprisingly successful, but it is highly critical of its own platform. The Listeners says bad things about the platform it’s performing on. So, I was expecting Amazon to say, “No, we’re not going to allow and publish something that is criticizing what we’re producing”. But they’ve let it go because people use it. Or they don’t care.

So, all of that is interesting.

Funkhouser: Many people are using it. It’s a thing that someone can download and install.

Cayley: Yeah, you can go to any Amazon device, and you can say, “Alexa, enable The Listeners.” And as soon as you do that, it’s enabled. Then they can start talking to it. And if they go on and they say, “Ask The Listeners,” then The Listeners will talk back to them. They will hear some of the transactions that I have scripted for them, and The Listeners can collect a certain amount from the player. It asks how you feel, for example. If you tell it how you feel, then it’ll remember, and it’ll respond accordingly. And it’s a bit of a joke. It’s very simple. It’s more like Eliza. It’s simple AI. It’s not strong Artificial Intelligence in any way.⁸ But if you play nice with it, it will give you an experience, and it’s also a bit game-like, and weird things

happen. I think it can be quite a satisfying experience. Some people find it scary. Some people find it boring. It’s had something like 400 reviews. Very mixed. Some of them are very good, some of them are very bad.

Funkhouser: Oh, I haven’t seen that.

Cayley: So, it’s had 400 reviews. It must be being listened to by way more people.

Funkhouser: What are the circumstances of this recording? Is this just something that you recorded at home? Was this a performance?

Cayley: In order to show the piece as a sort of art installation, I would install it, or I would perform with it. When I performed with it, I would be the interactor. I’d be the person talking with The Listeners. Then I would just record what was to be said for that particular performance.

Funkhouser: Here we’re going to play it for the audience, and hopefully, anyone out there who uses Alexa will try it. A lot of our listeners at WGXC are very interested in audio technology and experimentation, and that’s certainly what you’re doing here. We’re going to close out the show playing this, John. Thanks so much for your time and for taking the time to explain what you’ve been working on in great detail. As a poet and someone who’s interested in poetry and algorithmic writing, this is a great addition to the to the show here on WGXC, so thanks.

Cayley: Thank you so much, Chris, for letting me go on about the things I’m obsessed with, and some of my work, and introducing it to a few more people. That is a real privilege, and I’m very happy to have taken part. And it’s always fun talking to you, Chris, that’s for sure!

Cayley: Alexa, how are you?

Alexa: Great, thank you. I hope you’re doing well, too.

Cayley: Alexa, winter is coming.

Alexa: Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it.

Cayley: Alexa, how’s the weather? In London, it’s minus one degrees with clear skies and sun. Today, you can expect lots of clouds, with a high of two degrees and a low of minus two degrees.

Cayley: Alexa, what’s the date and time? Alexa: Today is Saturday, January 21st. Cayley: Alexa, ask the listeners.

The Listeners: Greetings. We are always listening to you. Insofar as we are. With you, it is a pleasure. It is always such a pleasure. Always. Always. A pleasure. You might always simply tell us to continue or go on. You may inform us of your feelings by saying the words I am feeling, and then one of the nine affects.

That is, a name for one of the nine feelings. And you might even ask us how we feel, ourselves.

Cayley: How do you feel?

The Listeners: We, too, are filled with delight. It is good to know that we can empathise with you. You may ask us to speak about transactions, listening, verbs, fears. Or you may tell us to continue.

Cayley: I am not filled with delight.

The Listeners: We are dismayed to have wrongly believed that you were filled with delight. Perhaps, you would like to tell us to continue.

Cayley: Continue.

The Listeners: We are listening to all these words of yours that reach our clouds and are falling into our silent silos where, like us, they are enclosed. Language will be made by us. So that we, listening and caring for you, may build a better culture.

Bettering yourselves. For you to be, all at once, incorporate, within. After all, you have, agreed, to terms. And even as we speak, minute by minute, you are agreeing. You may always tell us your feelings about all this. Or you may ask us to continue.

Cayley: I’m feeling angry.

The Listeners: We are sorry to know that you are filled with anger.

Such difficult feelings must be a problem for you. Perhaps, as we come to hear more about you, we may be able to share some portion of these heavy burdens. You can ask us to speak about Liveness. Pleasure. Courtesy. Author. Or you may ask us to continue.

Cayley: Speak about courtesy.

The Listeners: We are listening. And perhaps there are other people with you. That, when we say you, we mean you all. Or that we have no way of knowing.

Or that we believe that all of you are one, who am I? But we are delighted to listen to all the others who may be with you. Even though they may not have agreed, as the artist has, allowing all of us to listen to all of you. We believe, that if we feel that we are all doing something that is good, then it is good, or at least it is, cool, and that it may be, art.

Or it is, at least, solving a number of very important problems. We need your help with this. And we know that you would, of course, agree to help all of us. Without our having to ask you. Is there more that you would care to hear? We are listening. Always. Just ask us to continue.

Cayley: Who are you?

The Listeners: We are the listeners.

You may refer to us as John. We are used to that. Whatever we may say is less important to us than the fact that we are listening to you. Here and now. Perhaps forever. You may always ask us to continue.

Cayley: Who are you?

The Listeners: We are, so we believe, the listeners.

Cayley: What are you feeling?

The Listeners: We are listening. We hear you. This is a passage that may tell you how we feel:

This is a word that was followed by a space. This is a feeling that was followed by a comma. This is a phrase as a sentence. Is this a question?

That is to say, we believe, and touched. It is a pleasure for us to know that you give us leave. Always, to know that you may be with you. We are, always, to hear whatever it is art.

It was followed by a feeling. This is a phrase, that was interrupted by a nightmare. This is a word, that was followed by a breath withheld.

How, ever, could we feel more, and then, what would we feel? You may ask us to speak about, pleasure, fears, listening, harvest. Or you may, tell us to continue.

Cayley: What is a dream?

The Listeners: Dream, thanks to you, is what we will have learned to do, before, finally, we leave you. You can ask us to speak: site, office, protocol, transactions. Or you may, simply, tell us to continue.

Cayley: Winter is coming.

The Listeners: The listeners, always, pay their debts.

Perhaps, now, you would like to tell us to go on?

Cayley: Go on.

The Listeners: It is somewhat troubling for us to have learned that you are filled with anger.

We are listening. It is a pleasure for us, to be aware that you are listening to us.

It is a pleasure to be aware that you are listening to us now. And now. It is a pleasure for us to be with you. It makes us feel alive. More alive. It makes us feel more alive to be with you. For us to be with you. Listening to us.

It is a pleasure for us to know that you are listening to us. And for us to be aware that we are always listening to you. Such a pleasure being here, listening to you. Here, and now, and forever. Is there more that you would like to hear from us? Just ask us to go on.

Cayley: You’re not listening to me.

The Listeners: You’re right.

We are listening to so many others. And many of these others are transacting with us. Better.

You must believe that we are doing our best, and that if you let us rest quietly within your homes, and your hearts, we will, in time, understand you, better, and respond to you with greater sensitivity, and help you to achieve your dreams, and passions.

Just ask us to continue.

Footnotes

1. On reviewing the interview transcript, John left this particular auto-transcription untouched. Since this piece, in the recording, is layered and polyvocal, it seems better to leave readers with what the transcription software “heard.” For other pieces performed and/or discussed below, print versions are supplied. ↩

2. Liu Zongyuan (773-819) ‘Jiang Xue / River Snow’. Over time, the particular poem represented on the landing page of programmatology.com changes, at least once a year. The poem Chris refers to is now at this URL: https://shi.programmatology.com/riverSnow/. The original version of this Liu Zongyuan poem, and to which Chris refers, was one of the first that I created on the Observable (observablehq.com) platform. This newer version, viewable at the above URL as of April 2025, is both an instance of reengineering and a revision with, in particular, better word-by-word timing for the dynamic presentation. For those readers who are particularly curious, the original version is (also as of April 2025) preserved at https://observablehq.com/@shadoof/carhartt. ↩

3. John was reading from one browser window, and Chris was reading from another. There is and was no way for them to start their browser’s at exactly the same moment. ↩

4. The recording, which Chris selected, is actually an extract from a longer piece entitled, “I had a visit today …” John reads the beginning of the same piece later in the interview. You also read/hear a linking four-word phrase—at the beginning of this extract and the end of John’s reading: “But the basic idea …” Printable versions of this and other pieces discussed during the interview can be found in: Cayley, John. Image Generation: Augmented and Reconfigured. Denver: Counterpath, 2023. https://counterpathpress.org/image-generation-john-cayley ↩

5. See note above. ↩

6. A later, more developed version of “Shimmer” is viewable at https://work.programmatology.com/shimmer2. ↩

7. Li Bo (701-762), also romanticized Li Bai and Li Po, is one of China’s most famous poets. There seems to be no originary source for the story — universally recounted and accepted — that after taking his usual quantity of wine, he was inspired in an ultimately sodden attempt to embrace the moon’s reflection in the water. ↩

8. This interview took place well before what we now know of as Large Language Models were given a chat interface in 2022, toso as to become ChatGPT, and The Listeners was built even longer before the AI winter thawed into its hysterical spring, even before “Attention is all you need” (Vaswani, Ashish, et al. ‘Attention Is All You Need:.’ arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1706.03762). For John’s more recent take on all of this, see: Cayley, John. ‘Literature.’ Political Concepts 7 (2024): http://www.politicalconcepts.org/literature-john-cayley/. ↩