About us

Our approach to documentary and digital storytelling is:

experimental and epistemological: we approach artworks as philosophical and empirical thought experiments; we seek to find new forms that uncover or liberate new and important ways of thinking;
historical and archival: we bring the past into dialogue with the present, examining the history of ideas, cultural practices to retrieve concepts and techniques that are of value to the contemporary moment;
attuned: we start by listening to the things that aren't said, looking for what is hidden or invisible; defamiliarizing in new contexts;
scaled: we make works that address personal, interrelational, societal, and planetary scales;
elemental and located: we study places from the inside out and the outside in, thinking about water, seeds, combustion;
technological: in our art we use technological advances to record, visualize, disseminate, and create effects, such as basic chemistry to etch metals, form plastic, create other visual effects. We seek non-traditional visualizing , using microscopes and telescopes and skycams and xrays; hydrophones and contact microphones. Our digital work leans heavily on advances in Web GLX/VR/AR capabilities, work with scientist/coders to achieve these works- the result artworks are conversations amongst artists/scholars/ scientists.
poetic: we perceive and try to share beauty everywhere, in abstract concepts, people, places, and the material world.
co-creative: we have been working with and thinking critically about the role of artificial intelligence in large language models

Jolene Armstrong

Jolene Armstrong is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Athabasca University. She is a member of the Decameron Collective, whose past work includes Decameron 2.0 (honorary mention for the Robert Coover Award For a Work of Electronic Literature 2022), Memory Eternal (Digital Humanities Award 2023 and Shortlisted for Wonderbox Digital Opening Up - New Media Writing Prize Award 2023), Deformances Unlinked (Spelarne), and Slava Ukraini which have exhibited internationally in Italy, Portugal, Estonia, Japan, Colombia, the United States, and Canada. As a multimedia artist, Armstrong's creative and translated work has appeared in Galaxy Brain, Peatsmoke Journal, DeLuge Literary Journal, MacroMicrocosm (Folk Issue), Wildroof Journal, Beyond Words Literary Magazine (Issue 22, 25, 26, 28), The Hunger Mountain Review, The Society for Misfit Stories, The Silk Road Review, ArtWife Magazine, and The Antonym. She is particularly interested in the intersection of art and literature and the potential that immersive environments present as storytelling mediums.

As a co-founding member of the Decameron Collective, along with hosting workshops, presenting and publishing papers, Armstrong had the opportunity to expand her art practice to work withing emerging technologies in VR, AR and Web XR. Equally interested in traditional fine arts such as painting and sculpture, bookmaking, collage, metalworking, resin and photography, Armstrong, a self-admitted techo-phile, uses technology in unusual ways, in what she would describe as a kind of modern alchemy that blends methods and materials in new and surprising ways. As part of a daily creative practice, she assembles in images and words the shimmering, sometimes terrifying, ephemeral beauty that marks our collective existence on this blue planet. She lives and works in Amiskwaciy-Wâskahikan, treaty 6 territory (Edmonton, Canada) with her two kids and a menagerie of weird pets and projects strewn about her house. www.jolenearmstrong.ca

Monique Tschofen

Monique Tschofen is Associate Professor of English at Toronto Metropolitan University, and the Joint York-Toronto Metropolitan Graduate Program in Communications and Culture, a scholar of new media, visual culture, Canadian studies, and globalization, and a digital storyteller, working with poetry, sound art, experimental film, and AI generation. Her publications include textbooks on film and literature, literature and multimedia, and literary hypertext, as well as edited collections of essays on Canadian writers and filmmaker Atom Egoyan. Her research theorizes the relationship between art and philosophy, asking about the conditions under which an artwork can be an “act of theory," looking at modernists like Gertrude Stein, and contemporary digital installation art, experimental cinema, and ekphrastic poetry.

More recently, she was a founding member of the feminist Decameron Collective, a group of nine interdisciplinary scholar-creators from across Canada, whose interdisciplinary, public-facing projects emerge from a practice of collaborative research co-creation anchored in care ethics. Investigations of past and present moments experiment with creative digital humanities and research creation methodologies. With the members of the Collective, Monique has produced and exhibited two digital storyworlds and co-created a body of over twenty sound and video works, chapbooks and artbooks, as well as hosted workshops, conference presentations, and written manifestos and scholarly papers about the implications of this collaborative, living archive. Fusing poetry, algorithmic generation, digital photography, animation, and sound art, with the histories of manuscript culture and book making, Monique's work tests the possibilities of digital worldbuilding and feminist collaborative co-creation by generating new works and scholarship about them.

This work has been acknowledged internationally, with Honorable Mention for the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature (Decameron 2.0, 2022), the Digital Humanities Award (Memory Eternal, 2023), and shortlisted for the Wonderbox Digital Opening Up - New Media Writing Prize (Memory Eternal, 2023).

Her body of new works including the embodied documentary Aquaphoria: Before the Water Rises and a body of digitally augmented handmade books are informed by feminist new materialism, and make contributions to the environmental humanities.

In 2024-25, she is Visiting Fellow at Massey College, University of Toronto.

For her academic research, see https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9594-8424