Artist Portfolio

Portfolio
Jolene Armstrong and Monique Tschofen
Jolene Armstrong and Monique Tschofen are Canadian artists and academics, with PhDs in Comparative Literature and Film Studies, whose interdisciplinary, public-facing projects contribute to the growing body of works that use VR worldmaking as a speculative tool to critically examine crises and re-imagine diverse and ethical futures. In multiple award-winning collaborative and solo projects, they have evolved an approach to storytelling and a documentary aesthetic that is informed by philosophy, aesthetics, literature, and science, that enters into dialogue with past practices and forms, is shaped by feminist care ethics, anchored in everyday life, and oriented to the human and non-human other.
Projects
Decameron 2.0 (2022)
WebGL, explorable online storyworld
The Decameron Collective
Jolene Armstrong, Kelly Egan, Lai-Tze Fan, Caitlin Fisher, Angela Joosse, Kari Maaren, Siobhan O'Flynn, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Monique Tschofen
Developer: Hendrick de Haan
Awards
Honorable Mention, Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature (2023)
Exhibitions
PhilosoPHIA Conference, Society for Continental Feminism. Mount Royal, Calgary. March 16, 2024
International International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling ICIDS 2023, November 11th-15th, Kobe, Japan.
Electronic Literature Organization Media Arts Festival, Como Italy, May 30-June 1, 2022.
RUBIX 2022 Digital Exhibits, TMU University, December 2021.
Description
The Decameron 2.0 (2022) is an interactive explorable web-based world that takes its cue from Giovanni Boccaccio's medieval narrative set in Florence during the Black Plague. Featuring 100 co-created poetic thought experiments, it offers an audio, video, and textual living archive of life during the pandemic that centers women's experience.
Memory Eternal | Вічная Пам'ять(2023)
Virtual Reality Experience designed for Meta Quest 2
The Decameron Collective
Jolene Armstrong, Kelly Egan, Lai-Tze Fan, Caitlin Fisher, Angela Joosse, Kari Maaren, Siobhan O'Flynn, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Monique Tschofen
Developer: Hendrick de Haan
Awards
2024 – Digital Humanities Award for (US)
2024 – Shortlist - Wonderbox Digital Opening Up New Media Writing Prize for (UK)
Exhibitions
Interactive Film and Media Conference, Toronto, June 11 2024.
Electronic Literature Organization Media Arts Festival. VR storyworld. Coimbra, Portugal, July 12-15, 2023.
Description
Named after the Ukrainian Orthodox prayer for the dead, the Canadian feminist Decameron Collective’s Memory Eternal (Вічная Пам'ять) is a single user Virtual Reality work designed for Quest 2 featuring seventeen distinct storytelling works including 360 video, interactive and spatialized sound, AI generated images and video, film, and text. Set in a surreal and watery landscape, the works investigate our shared experiences of grief and loss at personal, societal, and planetary scales. The design of the world, and the works in it, center around the question: In the wake of crises, what do, and should we remember, and how? The journey through the world takes interactants through experiences of mourning, sitting with, and awakening to new futures.
Spelarne (The Players)
Augmented Reality. Handmade art book on watercolour paper with original block prints augmented with still and moving images. Co-created with Large Language Models
Jolene Armstrong
Exhibitions
Transforming Literary Places, Tartu, Estonia, January 2024
Electronic Literature Organization, Media Arts Exhibition, Florida, U.S.A, virtual digitized version, 2024
Description
Slava Ukraini |(Слава Україні)
Virtual Reality Experience designed for Meta Quest 2
Jolene Armstrong, Hendrick de Haan
Exhibitions
ICIDS International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, Barranquilla, Colombia, December 2-6, 2024
Description
Slava Ukraini investigates war in a powerful, immersive VR experience that integrates found sound and war footage from the war to challenges viewers’ understanding of the impact of war, not just in terms of casualty and geopolitics, but in the way that war erodes dignity and humanity. The immersive creative documentary experience seeks to amend this erosion with immersive empathy and assertions of beauty, kindness and care, drawing to the foreground the very human flesh and blood, the songs, and cultural bones of the people who have been fiercely defending their right to exist.
In There Behind the Door
Monique Tschofen
Interactive poetical/cinematic thought experiment, using Replicate LLMs, published on Scalar
Exhibitions
Electronic Literature Association Media Arts Festival, Florida, July 18-21, 2024.
Description
In There, Behind the Door offers a deformance of a selection of poems from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons: Objects - Food - Rooms (1914) using sound-, text-, image-, and video-generating AI. The deformances are not illustrations of Stein's text, but rather demonstrations of the types of thought experimentation that Stein practiced and theorized. This exhibition is part of a larger project that uses large language models to investigate Stein's poetics and, reciprocally, uses Stein's poetics to investigate large language models.
Careless Water | Streams of Artificial Thought
Monique Tschofen
Interactive cinema, ArcGIS, Replicate models
Exhibitions
ICIDS International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, Barranquilla, Colombia, December 2-6, 2024
Description
Set near the river Seine at one of the originary locations of the origins of literary modernism, Careless Waters explores confluences of ideas and the flows of thinking itself. Haunting, poetic works accessed as a user interacts with historical map of Paris render an artificial consciousness in action wrestling with a language practice designed to show a human mind in action. Co-creating with Large Language Models continues the spirit of empirical scientific experimentation in cognitive science that drove the production of art at the turn of the 20th century.
Gudrid: An AR experience
Augmented reality
Jolene Armstrong and Brock Armstrong
Description
Gudrid is the re-imagined story of the first known European woman to live in and give birth within North America as part of an early Viking settlement. The AR (Augmented Reality) experiment uses AI rendered film animations to imagine and create a dream-like landscape and to communicate the harsh reality of these early travelers as they ventured beyond the know boundaries of their world. AR enables this semi-historical tale to be layered over present realities. The animations flicker in an out of focus as the story unfolds about the ill-fated group of Viking explorers.
Aquaphoria (Before the Waters Rise)
Monique Tschofen, Imprint Documentary Collective (2024)
Poetic documentary film
Screenings
Nominee
LA Independent Women Film Awards
Toronto Short Film Festival March 2025
Under consideration
DCEFF Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital (US)
Capital City Film Festival
Melbourne International Film Festival
Boulton International Film Festival
All Senses Film Festival;
Environmental Film Festival at Yale;
Environmental Film Festival;
Boulder Environmental/Nature/Outdoors Film Festival;
British Columbia Environmental Film Festival;
Capital City Film Festival;
Environmental Film & Screenplay Festival;
Bolton International Film Festival;
Fisura, International Festival of Experimental Film & Video
Description
Aquaphoria is an intimate poetic documentary study of water through the lens of anticipatory grieving. The filmmaker scans the continent of North America, from the Smokey Mountains to the California coast to Alaskan fjords. A spectacle for all the senses.
Chronophotographs
Monique Tschofen
Augmented reality; philosophical ekphrastic poetry printed on linen paper, with digital augmentations.
Exhibitions
Electronic Literature Association Media Arts Festival, Toronto, 2025
Description
A series of ekphrastic poems in dialogue with the early scientific works of Jules Etienne Marey, with digital augmentations of sound and video.
Aphasia
Jolene Armstrong
Geodes (interactive locative narrative)
Exhibitions:
The Current, New York, virtual 2024
Description
Aphasia is a short film created for the locative media Geodes project in response to witnessing the development of aphasia--the inability to produce language or be able to communicate using language as a result of traumatic brain injury--in a loved one. The film depicts the almost surreal morphing of words, the failed acts of communication and the sorrow of that loss.

Seed Generator
Virtual Reality cinema (Quest 2); two-screened installation
Monique Tschofen
Exhibitions
Interactive Film and Media Conference, Toronto, June 11 2024.
Electronic Literature Organization Media Arts Festival. VR storyworld. Coimbra, Portugal, July 12-15, 2023.
Description
"Seed Generator" is a two-screened cinematic installation that asks how we grow hope. The title is based on a pun; AI image generation begins with seeds—numeric blueprints that are randomized with each subsequent generation. An AI image is at once a memory machine, combining and recombining vast bodies of inputs from the cultural past, and a generator of possible futures. “Seed Generator” opens with a montage of Midjourney-prompted images of beings that can never be, and culminates with the words of an emerging scholar, Al Cunningham Rogers, whose vision of grieving a burning planet involves recognizing ourselves, in their words, “as part and relation of a network of living beings, utterly and absolutely dependent on them” (2022).

More than we can assimilate
Animation, poetic film.
Submitted to Poetry Films, Millennium Film Workshop (Brooklyn, NY)
Monique Tschofen
Description
A disorienting first person feminist film poem that takes up Carolee Schneeman's claim that our best developments grow from things that initially strike us as “too much,” which “contain more than we can assimilate.”
Care
Jolene Armstrong
Exhibitions:
Geodes (interactive locative narrative) 2024
Description
Care is a short film that records the daily, multiple comings and goings of caring for an elderly loved one- shot of the course of several weeks it lovingly depicts the self-less acts of care that are carried out, day and night, but also not shying away from the way in which care is relentless, exhausting and generally falls to women to perform.
Happenings
Monique Tschofen
Interactive literature; poetry and film, with some AI generation, published in Scalar.
Exhibitions
Interactive Film and Media, July 2025.
Nominated: New Media Writing Prize, 2025
Description
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.
Data Dystopia
Jolene Armstrong
Experimental film, with AI generated images
Publication
Artwife magazine 2022
Description
Data Dystopia is a response to the sudden appearance of generative AI, the push for Machine Learning and the feeling of data overwhelm. It was created using Midjourney v.3, in a mid-century style reminiscent of Cold War era and Big Brother Aesthetics.
The Pandemic Was Here
Jolene Armstrong
Photo Essay + experimental film
Exhibition
Decameron 2.0, 2022
Description
The Pandemic Was Here is a photo series of 52 images-- one for each week of the first year of the pandemic-- of masks and other pandemic garbage that was observed while walking around my neighbourhood during the lockdowns when walking was all we were allowed to do. It asks viewers to consider the far reaching impact of a global pandemic, the traces it will leave upon our environment, and the way in which it consumed every moment of our days and daily rhythms.
Daily Cup of Covid
Jolene Armstrong
Documentary photo Essay + experimental film
Exhibition
Decameron 2.0, 2022
Description
Daily Cup of Covid is a multimedia piece in which slogans collected from the early days of the pandemic are printed on used tea bags. Riffing on a quote from T.S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,"
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
to portray the oddly measured, yet chaotic way that the world responded fumbled their way through responding to the unfolding Covid-19 pandemic.

Tender Buttons
Monique Tschofen
Augmented Reality (8th Wall); handmade book, printed on linen paper, Japanese stab binding with linen thread
Exhibition
Electronic Literature Association Media Arts Festival 2025
Description
Inspired by the work of physicist Karen Barad and modernist poet Gertrude Stein, this handmade book featuring AI-imagined buttons and button holes speaks to the things that bind us to each other. On exhibition, there will be digital augmentations on each page; a user will be able to hold their phone to the page trigger to see and hear the soundtrack and poetic narrative.

Cyanotypes
Jolene Armstrong
Handmade folding book, cyanotype printed on watercolour paper from the negative of microscopic image of heart tissue
Exhibition
Electronic Literature Organization Media Arts Festival, 2025
Description
This work takes a transparency of a microscopic image of heart tissue, treating the textures, shapes, and variance of light and shadow and prints it as a cyanotype. It is a hand made, folding book on water colour paper.
Covid Stories Maternal Worries
Monique Tschofen and Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof
Handmade book featuring histopathological stains from epilieptic brains, EEGs, photographs of cathedrals and photographs of trees.
Exhibition
Electronic Literature Association Media Arts Festival, 2022
Description
This book lovingly documents our collaborator's experiences as a mother of an epileptic child during the pandemic lockdown. The book develops a visual lexicon that helps visualize parallels between the sacredness of the human brain and cathedral rose windows.


Lonely
Poetic Documentary
Music by Kari Maaren, film by Monique Tschofen
Exhibition
PhilosoPHIA Conference, Society for Continental Feminism. Mount Royal, Calgary. March 16, 2024
International International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling ICIDS 2023, November 11th-15th, Kobe, Japan.
Electronic Literature Organization Media Arts Festival, Como Italy, May 30-June 1, 2022.
RUBIX 2022 Digital Exhibits, TMU University, December 2021.
Description
This poetic documentary film centers a pod of Pilot Whales surrounding their young. Shot with the help of naturalists off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada.

Chatbot
Carrie Sija Wang, Mark Marino, Monique Tschofen and Jolene Armstrong
AI-generated chatbot designed by Carrie Sija Wang
Exhibition
Rituals of Social Transformation, Brooklyn’s Head Hi, Brooklyn, New York, January 26, 2024.
Description
This AI- and algorithmically-generated work explores the humanization of machines and the mechanization of humans, asking the machine about the ethical futures it envisions.
Like a Drowning
Poetic Documentary
Jolene Armstrong, produced by IMPRINT Documentary Collective
Screenings
Under consideration
DCEFF Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital (US)
Description
Fire and Water is a creative documentary that meditates, worries about the unfolding climate crisis in Western Canada as it plays out in yearly forest fires, droughts, and periodic flash flooding. “Somtimes a drowning doesn’t look like a drowning.”
Depending Upon a Particular Relation
Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof and Monique Tschofen
Philosophy-film
Exhibition
Part of the Decameron 2.0
Description
In my own poetic works which treated themes of motherhood, sisterhood, and friendship, I engaged with Aristotle’s metaphors of building, generation, and change, as well as his theories of the body and love from Rhetoric, Physics, and the Nicomachean Ethics. I wrote an Aristotle poem for Izabella that drew from Aristotle’s Ethics and Physics that treated love as a form of cyclical and circular movement, Upon a Particular Relation, and she made a film for it that manifested these movements in a camera language of tilts and pans.

Fire and Water
Jolene Armstrong and Monique Tschofen
Diptych Installation: sculpture + projected art
Exhibition
Electronic Literature Association Media Arts Festival 2025
Description
This installation is a diptych that comments on and critique disaster media and their environmental footprint. A handmade book whose pages, made of epoxy, look like water, sits along side a two minute and thirty five second work of kinetic poetry projected in a loop. The kinetic poetry was composed entirely in ChatGPT, which first designed and modified a Markov generator and then executed it using the Live Feed of the New York Times coverage of the Pallisades fires. The poetry is fused to a series of watercolor paintings as well as the video source that inspired them, terrifying footage of two men and a dog trapped in a house, surrounded by fire that was circulating on social media during the LA fires. Together, the works’ use of elit tools in combination with analogue expression in painting and sculpture, imagine a world that is either drowning or burning, and asks us to consider art and literature on the precipice of environmental collapse.