It wasn’t until I started my college education that I was introduced to and really contemplated digital storytelling. How would you define/capture the concept of digital storytelling?

That phrase is used in a lot of different ways. It can mean making digital animations that are narrative, for instance. I wouldn't usually call my own work "digital storytelling" for two reasons, the digital (I prefer "computational") and the storytelling (it can falsely suggest some type of oral or "telling" mode). I work not just with story and narrative, but also with other modes of language and literature in my involvement with poetry and poetics. So, "computational poetry," or "computational narrative," or "computational literature" all indicate different but related areas of my own practice. I research in these areas as well.

And what is its value in today’s society?

There are many sorts of value but I'll mention one: It's an exploration of computation, language, and their intersections that resonates with culture in unique ways. We learn things about ourselves as a language community, a literary tradition, a culture with history when we extend our work into new sorts of computational literature. And we learn about our cultural engagement with computing and discover new possibilities there, too.

What drew me to connect with you was being introduced to your website Taroko Gorge. I thought the piece shared some of the thematic dualities found in Love and Information where Caryl Churchill allows for the scenes within each section of the play to be re-ordered. This randomization being used to get across the themes and ideas of the show is part of what resonated with me in regards to your poem. Can you speak a bit on your inspiration and artistic choices for “Taroko Gorge” and your intent for the effect of the ‘computation’ of your poetry?

I suppose I think of Taroko Gorge as a computer program than a website. The original version of it is a Python program. I then wrote a JavaScript program, which is much better known and is what you encountered on the Web.

My idea in writing/programming Taroko Gorge was simply to show that just as someone could go to a place of natural beauty and write a nature poem there, I could could go to a place of natural beauty and write/program a generator of nature poetry. The poetry generator is meant to relate to my experience of walking along and seeing particular things, going through tunnels that were carved out by Chang Kai-shek's army, pausing at viewing areas, and so forth. In writing/programming this, I defined a particular form in which there are strophes of variable length that are continuously produced, with one-line strophes between them.

The ‘controlled randomization’ concept of each of these pieces reminds me of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories—many of which can be found through the Electronic Literature Organization’s volume collections (the most recent linked here). While it became a bit too complicated to organize that interactive piece of storytelling in our specific production, could you talk a bit about your role as the President of ELO and the difference that lies in the experience of a reader/player/audience when they engage with electronic, interactive forms of storytelling versus more traditional ones?

I study and teach the actual CYOA books and similar multisequential books. These aren't electronic literature, although they are types of interactive narrative systems and can be very compelling experiments. In several cases there are print and e-lit versions of the same multisequential story, e.g. Jason Shiga's Meanwhile. The differences there are at the "interface," paratextual, and material levels, and also that people have different expectations about books and their contexts versus what they encounter on the computer. The full answer would take volumes, but there are cases where there's no real formal or structural difference, whether the work is print or digital.

Perhaps a better point of comparison is to "shuffle literature" where a deck of cards, loose sheets, or similar items is randomly shuffled and read: http://electronicbookreview.com/essay/shuffle-literature-and-the-hand-of-fate/

There are of course plenty of interactive theater productions, improv ones such as those by Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind and The Improvised Shakespeare Company, and a rehearsed one that I saw several years ago at La MaMa where a giant fuzzy die was rolled by audience members to determine the next scene.

By the way, is the order of scenes within each art of Love and Information "random" in the sense that it is supposed to be determined by chance, or does Churchill indicate that the director can *choose* any any order? That seems like a big difference to me, even if the choices are made beforehand in both cases and fixed for the entire run.

Not having seen or read the play, I also wonder about how interesting it would be to see the play twice with different ordering -- or maybe it would be more interesting to see a single act twice than the whole play once? In showing this project, the artists always made sure to run it more than once for the audience: https://vimeo.com/357559820

Caryl Churchill explores the ideas of ‘love’ and ‘information’ as if they are two sides to the same coin and the two farthest reaches of a scale—ideas that cannot exist without each other, yet have considerable differences to complement their surprising similarities. I find it fascinating (as an Interdisciplinary Studies major espectially) that you have attained degrees in computer and information science (which is represented in the informational world Churchill builds) AND poetry (a more ethereal realm of study, moreso associated with feelings than information, per se). Could you describe your interest in each of these areas and how they interact together, and what brought you down the path of marrying the seemingly polar concepts together through your career?

I can't see how computation and poetry are opposite concepts, any more than bodies moving around a stage and spoken language are opposite concepts. I grew up playing arcade videogames, programming home computers, "playing" or interacting with interactive fiction on my computer, reading and writing poems and otherwise involved with literature. So there was no encounter, courtship, and marriage -- the artistic practice I developed was computational and literary from the beginning.

What have been the most both intellectually and emotionally rewarding projects of your career and/or moments of your life? What lessons have you taken away from that/them?

It's certainly been rewarding to see Taroko Gorge reworked, and used as the basis for creative projects, by so many people. This is great from a standpoint of wanting people to learn more about creative coding and from a standpoint of engagement with poetic language and form.

Of my collaborations, the more involved and longer-term projects stand out:

2002: A Palindrome Story with William Gillespie; Implementation with Scott Rettberg; Sea and Spar Between with Stephanie Strickland; The Deletionist with Amaranth Borsuk and Jesper Juul; the book we call "10 PRINT" that I wrote with nine others; and the Renderings translation project.

Particular moments related to these that were special? Those include having the Oulipo acknowledge 2002 as the world's longest literary palindrome and having The Deletionist exhibited at Perogi here in New York as the only digital work in Under Erasure, alongside amazing art and iterature.

Recently I've been writing many computer programs to generate literary books. I love doing this, particularly when the process is engaging and the result is pleasing. It's also great to work with editors/designers/producers to realize these books in material form -- in particular Tim Roberts, Teresa Carmody, Holly Melgard, and Augusto Corvalan. And then, as the editor of the book series Using Electricity (published by Counterpath, which Tim Roberts directs), I get to work on the other side of things with author/programmers who develop projects. This is invigorating. Doing readings with my fellow author/programmers is also great, and allows us to reach new readers and connect with new communities.

Regarding new communities, I'm also really honored to have have two of my computer-generated books translated: World Clock to Polish by Piotr Marecki, Megawatt to German by Hannes Bajohr. The Poles are extremely discerning in literary matters, and World Clock was published in the same book series as the only Polish translations of Tristram Shandy and Finnegans Wake!

I have my own "micropress," and my own website, and have no compunction at all about self-publishing. Taroko Gorge was "self published," as were World Clock and Megawatt. However it's artistically and personally great to work with others, too. Publishing with Counterpath, Les Figues, Troll Tread, and Dead Alive -- and editing the Using Electricity series -- has been wonderful in that regard.