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About us

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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. Their recent works together include an installation about the environmental crisis using sculpture and projector art Fire and Water (2025), an interactive documentary called Solastalgia (2025), and a body of new sound works that will cross sculptural forms with field sound recording. 

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 is Associate Professor of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. She publishes about research-creation methods at the intersection of art and philosophy. 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. 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). The Collective's capstone exhibition with new work in Augmented Reality using handmade artbooks and lightboxes is called Metamorphoses: Love Letters to Futures (2025). 

Monique's solo digital projects have also been exhibited internationally. 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 Florida.  Her experimental interactive work Happenings: A Tragico-Lyrical Philosophical Essay was shortlisted for both the Chris Meade Memorial Main Prize and the Social Good Prize in the 2024 New Media Writing Prize (UK), and was selected runner up for the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature (2025).  Her creative documentary film Aquaphoria (Before the Waters Rise), was awarded best environmental documentary of the Montreal Women Film Festival 2025, was also a nominee for the LA Independent Women Film Awards, the Toronto Independent Festival of CIFT a semi-finalist for the Calgary Indie Film Awards (2025), received Honorable Mention in the Experimental Forum (Los Angeles) (2025), and was an official selection of the Toronto Short Film Festival, the Liberty Festival (Athens), the Sofia International Film Festival (Bulgaria), the EcoCINE International Environmental and Human Rights Film Festival (Brasil).

 

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  1. Introduction Monique Tschofen