 It's a term I really like to describe the field that I'm in and the areas that I research is creative computing, the name of this old computer magazine at a time when the home computer allowed a lot of people to experiment and find out what the computer could do in terms of creating beauty, joy, entertainment. I'm a writer and a poet. I create interactive fiction and story generators and I'm very interested in language and specifically what the computer can do in these sorts of modes with language. One thing you can do with computers is to create really giant systems that embody certain ideas about cognition, narrative, and they're very large scale multi-year projects that use the computer as a way to investigate how stories are put together, for instance. So I have a project, Curveship, that is such a system. This is a project that builds on narrative theory. It also builds on existing very good models for how to put interactive fiction together and tries to take the form of interactive fiction in a new dimension. There's a lot of experimentalism in it. There's a lot of constrained writing in it. There's a lot of use of language and metaphor and specific ways in it. There's experimentation with narrative and loops and... It's a very yeasty feel because it brings a lot of people who have interest in high theory but also in how these theories get applied into actual production of avant-garde art. I also like to sketch and create very small scale story generators, poetry generators, other systems that I might think about for a while and then execute in a few hours. Taroko Gorge, which I wrote in one day in Taiwan, it has these single lines that are very long and that you can't see the end of, that trail off, which are like the tunnels in Taroko Gorge. And then these longer runs of lines which describe things that you might see on paths outside. And so it's meant to simulate in a certain way the process of walking through this park. Some of my friends and fellow writers and colleagues have taken this up and made their own versions like Scott Rettberg's Tokyo Garage, which is based on the code that I wrote but uses a large body of text that he brought in to replace what I'd written. Instead of being a portrait of a place that he visited, it's his imagination of what Tokyo is like based on all sorts of cultural stereotypes that we have in the West. And then J.R. Carpenter developed a piece about the excesses of consumption and eating that was simply called Gorge. So even though this is a simple piece that I did in one day, it offered to some other people a way in to think about how language might combine and how they might produce not just a single text, but a generator of language that gave us an interesting texture. I like this type of capability, the ability to sketch with digital media and work with this and to actually try out ideas by thinking through them in code and seeing how they work the same way that I might write something in my notebook. Between the lab model of the sciences where there's a lab director and then students do work and the solitary model of the humanities, there's not much possibility really for for the sort of collaboration in the world right now, but I'm trying to open up those particular sorts of possibilities and find ways that aren't hierarchical on the one hand or completely isolated on the other of doing academic work.