Cayley, John: Image Generation

Counterpath Press, paperback

Publication Date: May 1, 2023

Publisher Marketing: IMAGE GENERATION is a printed reader, gathering selected works from John Cayley's language art with computation. The book provides its human readers with some of Cayley's original texts, which were composed so as to be supplied to algorithmic processes of manipulation or generation. And it offers up printed versions of the prose and poetry that were produced by these processes. In cases where the computation was programmed for indeterminate outcomes, the resulting language might have been entirely different. These texts are often snapshots of something that may also be experienced in time and as a process. There are brief explanatory notes on many of these processes in the book's apparatus.

"Reading this superb collection leaves one with the unsettling, yet paradoxically satisfying, sense that no 'zero-count phrases' remain--that herein everything is contained. Cayley's complex compositional practices, from the translational to the computational, the poetic to the theoretical, have resulted in a volume that enacts the very idea of corpus with which it playfully, but critically, engages. This is writing that founds, that serves as the foundation for linguistic experiments still to come." --Rita Raley