The Decameron Collective
The Decameron Collective is a group of nine scholars and artists who have engaged in a weekly practice of collaborating, co-creating, and curating since March of 2020. Together, we have built and exhibited two digital storyworlds, run workshops, write scholarly papers, and experiment with AI.
Projects:
Our Omeka site documenting Memory Eternal and the Decameron 2.0 will launch early fall of 2025.
We are currently preparing for the Electronic Literature Association's Media Arts Festival a series of works using webAR that will include handmade books, a Pandora's box, and light boxes.
In 2024, a group of four collective members exhibited works at the Electronic Literature Association's Media Arts Festival under the banner of Deformances. In four experimental adaptations of literary works, from Beowolf to the Yellow Wallpaper to Tender Buttons to Spelarne, a Swedish protomodernist short story, collective members made critical use of large language models.
Memory Eternal | Вічна Пам'ять (2023) is a VR world designed for Oculus. This work emerges in the wake of a global trauma, and expresses grieving at two scales – personal and collective. In the wake of crises, what do we want to remember and how? What futures should we imagine? How does care ground a wounded world?
Exhibitions:
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Electronic Literature Association Conference and Media Arts Festival, Coimbra, Portugal, July 12-15, 2023.
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New Media Prize Unconference, UK, May 15, 2024.
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Interactive Film and Media Conference, Toronto, Canada, June 11-14, 2024.
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RUBIX 10th Anniversary, Catalyst, Toronto, Canada, February 27, 2025
Awards:
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Shortlist - Wonderbox Opening Up Interactive Fiction - New Media Writing Prize (UK) (2023)
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Winner - Digital Humanities Awards (2023)
I imagine and it
becomes a memory..."
2022
The Decameron 2.0
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.
Exhibitions:
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Toronto Metropolitan University RUBIX Catalyst, Jan 27, 2022
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Electronic Literature Association Conference and Media Arts Festival, Como Italy, May 30-June 1, 2022.
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ICIDS: International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, Kobe Japan, November 12-17, 2023.
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PhiloSOPHIA: Society for Continental Feminism - Feminist Making, Doing, & Sensing conference, Mount Royal University, Calgary, March 14-17, 2024.
Awards:
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2023, Honorable Mention, Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature, Electronic Literature Association.
News
Publication
See our newly published article in University Toronto Quarterly's special issue devoted to pandemics (Jan 2025).
The open access publishing is supported by Athabasca University and the Dean of Arts, Toronto Metropolitan University.
https://utppublishing.com/doi/10.3138/utq.93.04.06
