Philosophical Toys, or, how to play with modernist poetics

How can digital tools and an experimental approach help us understand major works of literature? In my Gertrude Stein series, I have used coding and large language models to approach Gertrude Stein's important poetic work Tender Buttons (1914). These projects complement scholarly work I am undertaking on multimedia modernism and the philosophical origins of Stein's work.

In There Behind the Door (2023)

Stein's poetics frequently invite a more active, and more disruptive engagement. In There Behind the Door joins other projects that have taken up Stein's spirit of experimentation and drive to "keep a strange, estrange on it" (TB 52), deforming and performing her syntax, lexicon, and logical structures by operationalizing them in order to lay bare her philosophical concepts, a history of media, and the history of art.

🔸 Official selection for the 2024 Electronic Literature Organization's Media Arts Festival

🔸Discussed in a special panel on Deformances.

Careless Water (2024)

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.

🔸Juried exhibition: Official selection for the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) in Barranquilla, Colombia, December 2-6, 2024. https://icids2024.ardin.online/art-exhibition/

It Makes Sand (2026)

A moving, spinning philosophical toy that places a section of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons (1914) into a zoetrope. The game element puns on the poem's final image of making sense/making sand: users can "make sand" and dissolve the entire poem.

🔸 Discussed at the 2026 Modernist Studies Association's Weird Modernism conference in the UK.

A Kaleidostein (2026)

Another moving, spinning philosophical toy that places a section of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons (1914) into a kaleidoscope to yield a new short poem.

🔸 Discussed at the 2026 Modernist Studies Association's Weird Modernism conference in the UK.

A Blind Glass/Gloss (2026)

In A Blind Glass/Gloss, I worked with George Pechtol to develop a series of philosophical toys. The first is an intertextual reading instrument for Tender Buttons intended to demonstrate my scholarly claims that Tender Buttons is not stream of consciousness but rather a philosophical treatise or perhaps a philosophical toy. The glass refers to the allusions Stein makes in her first poem to (proto-cinematic) philosophical toys like the thaumatrope, zoetrope, phenakistoscope that Victorians used to demonstrate optical principles. An apparatus of mostly hyperlinked references help readers start peering into the history of philosophy, knowing that it is always a distorted glass. https://drmoniquet.github.io/ABlindGlossGlass/

🔸 Discussed at the 2026 Modernist Studies Association's Weird Modernism conference in the UK.

A Button Tenderizer (2026)

A Button Tenderizer is a final philosophical toy with George Pechtol. This one also reads the poem visually, pulling out philosophical lines from the poem and amplifying their references. More visual than the first two toys, this one uses a dynamism more connected to the cinema. https://drmoniquet.github.io/Stein-PhilosophicalToys2/

🔸 Discussed at the 2026 Modernist Studies Association's Weird Modernism conference in the UK.

Tender Buttonholes - Handmade book

Stein-inspired study of AI-imagined holes and fasteners. 2024

Critical AI - Twine tool

I made a twine resource for a forthcoming critical AI symposium that helps people make informed decisions about AI use in education.

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