Decameron Book Review

[Cookie Grosky]

Aspart of its efforts, the Decameron 2.0 is currently developing an online and open-access exhibition to house its collective works in a way that can intersect practices of GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) with electronic literature, the fine arts, the creative digital humanities, and the future of multimodal and digital publishing. To do this, the group explores methods and practices that allow for interactive, immersive, and inclusive user experiences of the Decameron 2.0's works, in consideration of how these works tie into their epistemological foundations in feminist media practices.

LL: [00:00:00] Well then, let's get started. So hello everyone. I'm Lulu, and I'm one of the Co-Editors for this special double issue of ebr and tdr, which are the electronic book review and the digital review. And I am currently a senior at the University of Waterloo studying Systems Design Engineering. And another interviewer with me today is Jin Sol.

JK: Hi, everyone. I'm Jin Sol, I'm also a Co-Editor on the special issue of tdr and ebr, "Critical Making, Critical Design". I am currently going into my fifth year of the PhD at the University of Waterloo. I'm in the department of English and I am studying the cross sections of critical race theory and digital photography.

LL: Cool. Thank you, Jin Sol. So let's start off with a land acknowledgement. So based in [00:01:00] Canada, the electronic book review would like to acknowledge that this land is made up of more than 630 First Nations communities representing more than 50 nations and 50 Indigenous languages. This interview is a part of a new ebr interview series called "Conversations" that was inaugurated in 2020. In the series, we speak to scholars and practitioners who are engaged in digital storytelling, electronic literature, and the digital arts amongst other topics. As a part of this new series, [besides individuals we've spoken to,] you are the first collective or group we are speaking to.

So as for everyone who is watching, we are joined here with seven members of the Decameron 2.0, a group of nine women scholars and artists here in Canada, who have spent the last [18 months] working on creative work, such as poetry prose, visual art and the like during and in response to COVID-19. They're inspired by the classical work of literature, the Decameron, about 10 people who left Rome during the black plague for [00:02:00] safety and who gathered to tell stories.

Before we get started with our interview questions, I was wondering if you could go around and introduce yourselves with your names, preferred pronouns, and maybe two or three sentences about you and your practice. And just as a little fun thing, a verb that kind of describes your day today.

LF: Hello, I'm Lai-Tze Fan. I'm an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada. I'm also one of the editors of the electronic book review and the digital review. My work is at the intersection of theory and practice, and I often think about questions of systemic bias in technological design. I also work in digital storytelling and interactive storytelling. Primarily, I would describe my work as interdisciplinary. A verb to describe my day... Rushed. No. Rushing. There we go.

CF: I'm Caitlin Fisher. I'm a Professor at York University in Toronto where I direct the Immersive Storytelling Lab. I'm also the vice-president of the Electronic Literature Organization. And yeah, a verb to describe my day? Lifting.

MT: I can go next. I'm Monique Tschofen. I'm at Ryerson University, which we are currently calling X university in solidarity with our Indigenous colleagues. And I work in the area of visual culture. My research all revolves around the question of whether an artwork can be an act of theory. I think it can. And the verb of the day, I think is dreaming.

JA: Okay, I can go next. I'm Jolene Armstrong. I'm an [00:04:00] Associate Professor at Athabasca University in Comparative Literature. I guess my main work in terms of what's relevant here is that I'm a multimedia artist, although not necessarily digital. And a verb to describe my day... I can think of lots of adjectives. Float, float, float, and floating, floating? Floating day.

KM: All right. I can go. My name is Kari Maaren. I am a contract lecturer at X University, the university formerly known as Ryerson. My area of expertise doesn't really matter because I'm a contract lecturer, but I do medieval stuff. So I guess this is appropriate.

IPO: Hey, I'm Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof. I'm an Associate Professor also at the X University. I am a filmmaker and I work both with analog obsolete technologies and digital technologies, including working with some AI for the Decameron project, part of this collective. I don't know what else to say except for a verb that describes my day: reading. That's what I started doing first thing this morning.

AJ: Yes. Hello, I'm Angela Joosse. And I work [00:06:00] mainly in experimental film, both analog and digital, as well as installation. I did my PhD in the joint program in communication and culture at York and X University, and I'm going to start a Master of Information degree at U of T starting this fall. Wading. I think that's a verb to describe my day.

LL: Alright. Thank you so much. So I guess we'll get started with our first question. And that would be: What motivated or inspired the new Decameron Collective project, and what would you say are its main objectives?

MT: Okay. Well, I won't say I inspired so much as craved. We were [00:07:00] turning a page in history and going into lockdown, and it felt like a really alienating space. So I think I had this post on Facebook and I asked if anybody would want to join the Decameron 2.0. And to my great surprise, everybody here jumped into the project, and it was something that really found its shape as we began to meet, first over cocktails and yakking, and then we began to write together, and we've been doing this weekly, I think without exception since basically March 2020.

LF: This is something that was a part of Lulu and Jin Sol's introduction, that we were inspired by the original Boccaccio's Decameron--the story of people who were isolated and who fled--another verb, to flee--came together and sought the opportunity to develop a new community, [00:08:00] band together, inspire each other, tell stories. Some fun stories, some naughty stories, but they found, I guess, companionship in isolation.

CF: Yeah, I love the idea of both, of the community and also the structure. So it really did appeal to me to have the regularity of the weekly meeting and also having sort of the intertext of Decameron as a form. I like the idea of regular storytelling and storytelling as sort of a practice to help to understand moments in our lives. So it seemed super apt. And I was really curious to see what kind of stories might come out of this time. So that's exciting.

But I think one of the things that did was that we all did read the introduction to it. The sort of the frame narrative in which these people are gathering to tell the stories. And Boccacio was basically taking this description of the plague from many other plagues.

He took older descriptions of the plague and he bundled them into his description of the plague, but it's kind of convincing when you read it. And it sounds like what's happening now. I mean, he's talking about...some people just decided that they would party, and some people shut themselves in their houses and they never went outside.

CF: I read it. I thought it was kind of crazy because it was filled with morality tales, but I actually thought [00:10:00] that it was, yeah, reading it as kind of like didactic texts to help to understand plague.

IPO: I guess the one thing I would like to also point out is it's just also wonderful to be surrounded by all these great women. And I look forward to that also weekly. And during the pandemic, it's been very difficult to kind of continue and be social. So this is not only, you know, this is very stimulating intellectually, creatively, but also emotionally.

So it's just been nice to bond this way. And another thing I would say is that after each session at the end of each session, we share the works we produce. And it's been [00:11:00] interesting to see the correspondences between some of the works. And also, I must say I've been inspired by many of them, so, yeah.

AJ: I joined the collective a bit later after a conversation with Monique, and I can say our weekly meetings became a real anchor for me. In the midst of lockdowns most of my daily routine shifted mainly to caring for others. Membership in Decameron 2.0 has helped me stay connected to a strong creative / intellectual community as well as creatively process the upheaval going on around me.

JK: That's very cool. It sounds like with the collective and Decameron 2.0, as you're calling yourselves, a lot of it is about companionship/community building and creativity. I see a lot of overlaps. Given the context with the original Boccaccio's Decameron, I'm wondering now, what are some of the key differences that you see between Decameron 1.0 (Boccaccio's Decameron) and Decameron 2.0?

MT: One of the things I would start with is that in fact, the similarities. So obviously the scenario in which we have found ourselves retreated from the world of plagues and telling stories to each other is similar, and the form [00:12:00] is as well. So the original Decameron is part of a genre of narrative known as frame narratives. The 1,001 Nights is an example. Marguerite deNavarre's Heptameron is another. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is another. These are stories that work really well and are very compelling because they're all about the persistence of story against death.

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