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Digital Imaginaries and the Decameron Storyworld

Poster for "Decameron 2.0" winning 2023 Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature, an international award given for the best work of electronic literature of any length or genre.

PI: Monique Tschofen (TMU) and Jolene Armstrong (Athabasca University) 

Collaborators: Kelly Egan (Trent), Lai-Tze Fan (Waterloo), Caitlin Fisher (York), Angela Joosse (U Toronto), Kari Maaren (TMU), Siobhan O’Flynn (U Toronto),  Izabella Pruska-Oldenhoff (TMU), Fanming Wang (TMU)

Digital Imaginations and the Decameron Storyworld (DIDS) is a research-creation project that aims to show how digital media can engage a social and political imaginary based on creativity, equity, community and shared world building.

DIDS has the following objectives:

  • generate new knowledge through the design of immersive exploratory digital worlds for the web or in VR headsets.
  • engage audiences while modeling an innovative research method that amplifies technology-driven research at the intersection of the arts and humanities.
  • expand potentials for cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional research and knowledge-building.

DIDS is centered around the production of immersive explorable digital worlds.  (external link) The Decameron 2.0 (external link)  (WebGL, 2022) is explorable like a video game but its closest cousins are the art gallery, archive, story anthology, film festival, and edited collection. The world holds a body of 100 collaboratively created works that test the boundaries between philosophically speculative, archival, poetic, and storytelling modes, using audio, text, video, photographs, music, and algorithmic generation. It has been exhibited in Italy, Japan, and Canada, and won Honorable Mention for the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature at the Electronic Literature Organization’s Media Arts Festival in 2023.