About the authors
Her most recent work, which will be exhibited in Toronto at the 25th anniversary ELO annual conference and media arts show and exhibited as part of a collective piece entitle "Metamorphoses" includes sculptural work using resin, a pandora's box of analogue and augmented media, poetry and a handmade book with digital augmentation. 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.
Over the past few years, Armstrong has turned her attention to alternative and embodied documentary- using equipment in unusual ways and finding ways to blend art and research to observe, document, describe, research and write about climate change, not only as a global threat but also as a local, and personal experience, inspired by living in a smoke zone, where fire is now a season that yearly threatens the livelihood of all species.
www.jolenearmstrong.ca
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 Gertrude Stein, 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 and Jolene have 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, the Collective'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).
Monique's solo project Careless Water (2024) was selected for juried exhibition at ICIDS (International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling) in Baranquilla, Colombia. In There Behind the Door (2024) was selected for juried exhibition at the Electronic Literature Organization's Media Arts Festival.
In 2024-25, she is a Visiting Fellow at Massey College, University of Toronto, and creating a body of works that move her even more explicitly into feminist and environmental spaces. With the Scottish Imprint Documentary Collective, she is making environmental documentaries. Aquaphoria (Before the Waters Rise) was a nominee for the LA Independent Women Film Awards, received Honorable Mention in the Experimental Forum (Los Angeles) (2025), won best Environmental Film at the Montreal Women Film Festival, and was an official selection of the Toronto Short Film Festival. Happenings, a work of interactive literature, was short listed for the Chris Meade New Media Writing Prize (UK) and Prize for Social Good New Media Writing Prize and is exhibited and discussed at IFM 2025.
Forthcoming works include a capstone exhibition of the work of the Decameron Collective that includes new work in Augmented Reality using handmade artbooks called Metamorphoses: Love Letters to Futures, and an installation with Jolene Armstrong called Fire and Water.
