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Portfolio

Jolene Armstrong and Monique Tschofen

About us

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

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.

landscapes; two films with excerpts from boccaccio from the Decameron 2.0 virtual world
a dome wrapped in vines sits across a body of water. Candles on lily pads lead the way.

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.

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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.

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Tschofen Careless Water

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.

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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.

Spell for Lifting - a poem by Monique Tschofen
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. 

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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).

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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Jolene Armstrong and Monique Tschofen, all rights

2025

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