Digital storytelling
I am a digital storyteller, working with poetry, sound art, experimental film, animation, documentary, and AI generation.
With the members of the Decameron Collective (Jolene Armstrong, Kelly Egan, Lai-Tze Fan, Caitlin Fisher, Angela Joosse, Kari Maaren, Siobhan O'Flynn, and Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof), I have produced and exhibited two digital storyworlds and co-created a body of over twenty sound and video works, chapbooks and artbooks. We have held workshops, conference presentations, and write manifestos and scholarly papers about the implications of the work we do together. See the Decameron Collective's webpage for more about what we do: https://www.decameroncollective.com/
Currently, Jolene Armstrong and I are co-PIs on a two-year SSHRC-funded project “Digital Imaginations and the Decameron Storyworld (DIDS)." Collaborators from the Decameron Collective (Kelly Egan, Lai-Tze Fan, Caitlin Fisher, Angela Joosse, Kari Maaren, Siohban O'Flynn, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof) and Fangmin Wang continue to test out the possibilities of digital worldbuilding and feminist collaborative co-creation by generating new works and scholarship about them.
🔸Official Selection: Electronic Literature Organization Media Arts Festival, Como Italy (2022)
🔸Official Selection: International Conference on International Digital Storytelling, Kobe Japan (2023)
🔸Official Selection: PhiloSOPHIA: Society for Continental Feminism - Feminist Making, Doing, & Sensing conference, Mount Royal University, Calgary (2024)
🔸Honorable Mention: the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature (2023)
The Decameron 2.0 was inspired by Boccaccio's medieval narrative about storytellers who survive the Black Death. This explorable storyworld, designed for WebGL, features 100 co-created poetic sound, film, and textual works.
My curated gallery within the world highlights works by myself and members of the Decameron Collective that investigate women's lives. Works about motherhood, friendship, sisterhood offer a counterpoint to the Western philosophical and literary tradition's elision and containment of women's stories.
The body of four works that make up the "Aristotle Suites" in the friendship gallery (co-created with Angela Joosse and Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof) are philosophical thought-experiments that play with foundational Aristotelian ideas around change and building, bringing them into feminist contexts.
Memory Eternal is an explorable world coded in Unity and designed for Oculus headsets. The world expresses grieving at two scales – personal and collective – touching on topics like war, pandemic, and family. It asks, in the wake of crises, what do we want to remember and how? Seventeen immersive elegiac pieces move between mourning and hopefulness.
🔸Official Selection: Electronic Literature Organization Media Arts Festival, Coimbra, Portugal (2023)
🔸Official Selection: Interactive Film and Media Conference, Toronto, Ontario, Canada (2024)
🔸Official Selection: New Media Writing Prize Unconference, London UK (2024)
🔸Official Selection: RUBIX 10, Toronto Metropolitan University (2025)
🔸Shortlist: Wonderbox Digital Opening Up - New Media Writing Prize (2024)
🔸Winner: Global Digital Humanities Award (2024)
In There Behind the Door, is a multimodal adaptation and deformance of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons that uses generative AI to imagine and activate her literary places. This work will eventually become a critical edition for students that adds to the understanding of Stein's experimental strategies and critical engagement with the media of her time.
🔸 Official selection for the 2024 Electronic Literature Organization's Media Arts Festival (Florida)
Careless Water | Streams of Artificial Thought, designed in ArcGIS, takes up the modernist question, first posed by William James, of the "stream of thought."
Careless Water exhibits works that render an artificial consciousness in action wrestling with a language practice that was designed to show a human mind in action. Set in and near the river Seine at one of the originary locations of modernism, it asks about the confluences of ideas, and the flows of thinking in the context of artificial consciousness.
🔸Official selection for the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) in Barranquilla, Colombia, December 2-6, 2024. https://icids2024.ardin.online/art-exhibition/
Happenings is an interactive narrative, published on on Scalar. A tragico-lyrical philosophical essay with cinematically haunted printed pages investigates the way Vladimir Nabokov, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Carolee Schneeman understood women's bodies. Short experimental films and an evocative soundtrack penetrate the printed page. The work is intentionally citational and dialogical, with a soundtrack made of field recordings of moths and butterflies as a nod to Nabokov's lepidoptery. This work is art of a series of experiments bringing cinema and literature closer together.
🔸Submission for the 2024 New Media Writing Prize (UK).
🔸Official selection, Interactive Film and Media (IFM) July 2025.
Solastalgia, by Monique Tschofen and Jolene Armstrong, is an interactive documentary about the climate emergency, published on on Scalar, that employs a range of analogue and digital documentary practices which include book making, watercoloring, embodied documentary filmmaking, and augmented reality to inquire into the climate emergency.
It is anchored in theories of embodiment (“the role of the felt sense and the body politic primarily in the process of making documentary films, and secondarily in the film’s subject matter, role in the media landscape, and impact of process on the filmmaker” (Monde)), asking what do our bodies already know about climate change?
The conceptual cornerstone of the work comes from eco-theoretical notions of "solastalgia," that is, the distress caused by environmental change (Albrecht et al.).
The Scalar ecology allows us to create an interactive, living, creative and data-driven assemblage to deepen our connections and understanding of global and personal events that includes maps, and rich media. Ultimately, our goal is to provide a model or “method” that emerges from interactive film and media studies, as well as idocs practice and methodologies, but also Walter Benjamin's Passagenwerk, for thinking and feeling our way into the climate crisis.
🔸Official selection, Interactive Film and Media (IFM) July 2025.
Chatbots
Exhibition Documentation, Jan 26, 2024, Brooklyn's Head Hi, NY NY.
AI Chatbot with Carrie Sijia Wang and Mark Marino - “Here Is What I Want to Talk About”
Video Installation on Bookshelves, Workshop Documentation, 2024
In a workshop led by the artist, participants were prompted to write down short conversations they imagined having with an AI, while being encouraged to think beyond the profit-driven and efficiency-focused perspectives. Utilizing a simple chatbot making template provided by the artist, participants turned the conversations into voice-activated interactive programs. The videos are recordings of participants interacting with the chatbots they built.