conclusion 211There were a small number of practitioners, a small number
of systems for composing text in digital media and a growing
realization that at some indeterminate point in the future...
text and textual practice would migrate to the new “writing
space” of networked programmatons.^9Cayley’s work windsound, winner of the 2001 Electronic Literature
Award for Poetry, can be labelled under the following categories:
‘ambient’, ‘appropriated texts’, ‘audio’, ‘multilingual’ and ‘text
movie’.^10 It is not an interactive work, but demands that the reader
watch carefully the morphing letters on the screen. Initially, a
paragraph forms that eventually is set and spoken in English.
Sound recordings of wind and ambient noise are also ever-present.
Immediately lyrical, the opening includes lines such as ‘taut winds
listen as the inn-keeper’s footsteps fade deep across the court-
yard’. Cayley’s text is algorithmically generated, that is words
and letters are gradually replaced onscreen, chronicling a move-
ment from illegibility to legibility that is constantly reviewed on a
twenty-three-minute program. The work includes intertexts from
Cayley’s own translation of a song lyric ‘Cadence: Like a Dream’
by Qin Guan ( 1049 – 1100 ), which also is subject to textual mor-
phing based on letter replacement. Stefans suggests that Cayley
has exploited the ‘programmaton’ – ‘the poetic object that is both
literary language and the language of code’.^11 Hints of a psycho-
logical landscape emerge and retreat in lines such as ‘long sunk
long drowned in the far waters of the night’ and ‘I cannot sleep’.
In her adjudication of windsound, Heather McHugh proposes that
the work challenges established reading practices by revealing ‘the
power of letters, even as it plays with the limits of literal intelligi-
bility’ and ‘explores the power of sequences, even as it plays with
non-sequitur’.^12 Central to Cayley’s poetics is that electronic media
enable the creation of provisional yet dynamic communities, since
he argues that: ‘On the net and in new media this – potentially and
in a number of demonstrable instances – translates to the spawning
of radical, marginal, evanescent, provisional text art communities
and collaborations that come together in software virtuality’.^13
Jenny Weight’s Rice ( 1998 ) by contrast, depends on hypertex-
tual links.^14 Enacting a travelogue, this interactive travel poem