Camille Intson
Knowledge Media Design Portfolio
Spring 2025
Gay Dreams and Feeling Machines:
Queering Mediating Technologies in Performance
DOCTORAL DISSERTATION — SPRING 2025
"This dissertation builds from trans-feminist and queer (TFQ) approaches to research-creation, phenomenology, and new media to design and analyze the conceptual-material 'queering' of three emergent new media practices—virtual reality design, intermedial theatre, and AI text generation—to imagine and model their creative directions. [..] This project ultimately demonstrates the possibilities of crafting alternate relations with technologies that may already be oriented against TFQ subjects, arguing for the urgency of practice-based interventional approaches to new media, technology, and design studies to procure the continued survival of TFQ people, politics, and poetics."
Armastusega Eestisse (To Estonia, With Love):
Kahe põlvkonna reisikiri (An Intergenerational Travelogue)
EXHIBITION DESIGN — SPRING 2025
"The exhibition follows the story of three generations of Estonian-Canadian women—Helen Rammo (née Haljaste), Marina Intson (née Rammo), and Camille Intson—tracing their ancestors’ footsteps from Estonia to Canada and back again in the aftermath of the 1940-1991 Soviet occupation." From Winter to Spring 2025, I designed all of the educational posters and promotional materials for this collaborative exhibit with the Estonian Museum of Canada.
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University Course Design
MDSD10H3 (UTSC), THF402 (TMU), INF2226 (UTSG)
SUMMER 2022 to WINTER 2025
During my doctoral career at the University of Toronto, I designed and taught courses at the Faculty of Information (St. George Campus), Department of Arts, Culture, and Media (Scarborough Campus), and Performance at the Creative School (Toronto Metropolitan University). I programmed modules on Canvas (Quercus) and Brightspace by D2L and used a variety of teaching formats including lecture, small and large group discussion, workshop, and practice-based in-class exercises.
Trans-Feminist-Queer Transformer
(Collaboration with BMO Lab for Creative Research)
RESEARCH-CREATION — SPRING 2024
The Trans-Feminist-Queer Transformer (Algorithmic Poetry Project) is a fine-tuned Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2) model trained on databases of trans-feminist and queer lyrical poetry, created in association with the University of Toronto's Centre for Theatre, Drama, and Performance Studies's BMO Lab for Creative Research. I undertook this project in the spring and summer of 2024 for a doctoral dissertation chapter.
JANE.
(Collaboration with Pantheon Projects/Tarragon Theatre/Cahoots Theatre/The Theatre Centre)
SUMMER 2022 to WINTER 2024
JANE is a 90-minute one-act speculative fiction drama which follows the actions of three undergraduate students embroiled in a virtual reality deepfake pornography scandal—exploring issues of digital consent and the anonymity of digital platforms, queer and feminist sexual politics, and the consequences (or lack thereof) of actions we take virtually. Over the past two years, I have been designing shadow and silhouette-based illusions and simulations of motion capture, using code and ASCII images to externalize and aestheticize how it feels for these characters to be entering an immersive online world, creating a theatrical language informed by the aesthetics and sensations of virtual reality technology.
Bisexual Bedroom Imaginaries
(Now Published in Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures 27)
RESEARCH-CREATION — SPRING 2023
“Bisexual Bedroom Imaginaries” is an immersive collage designed for virtual reality which brings together formative queer spaces, objects, and writings from my adolescence into adulthood. In reimagining the bedroom as a “queered” liminal space—full of desire, intimacy, and secrecy—I have created a shifting archive of ephemera from various stages of my journey into queerness.
Complex Pleasures
(Collaboration with Sexual Representation Collection)
SUMMER 2022
COMPLEX PLEASURES is a public exhibit featuring six short films that showcase complex representations, or subjective and troubling pleasures, confronting academics, archivists, and general audiences. All films on display come from the Erotic Film Collection, which is part of the Sexual Representation Collection, Canada's largest collection of sex work history and adult film history with a particular focus on feminist, queer, trans, and kink sexual cultures. I co-curated this exhibit with fellow doctoral student Maggie MacDonald and designed all of its posters, display cases, and promotional materials.
Autoethography Dossier
(KMD1001 Theory and Methods in KMD)
COURSE WORK — SUMMER 2021
"Welcome to this chaotic account of auto-ethnographic mediocrity, chronicling the last six weeks of my life as a summer student within the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. I’m going to level with you here — May-2021-Camille isn't the most likeable narrator. I don’t blame her. It’s been a rough couple of months and she is very tired. It’s been a long year and long winter and even longer spring. Pandemic burnout is real. Zoom fatigue is very real. But she’s been showing up and doing her best, even when getting up and logging onto another Zoom portal feels like a Herculean task. This dossier, and these prompt responses, are concrete proof of that."
Desktop Walkthrough Presentation
(KMD1001 Theory and Methods in KMD)
COURSE WORK — SUMMER 2021
For this presentation in KMD1001, I presented a virtual "walkthrough" of my desktop computer as we were remote during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. Here, I situate the desktop as a site of auto-ethnographic research, focusing on my desktop as a critical performance space.
Mock Grant Application - Ontario Arts Council
(KMD1001 Theory and Methods in KMD)
COURSE WORK — SUMMER 2021
"Hello, Internet Audience is a multimedia queer-feminist solo performance work about sexuality and the internet. This is a show for anyone who has ever struggled with self-representation in the digital age, or questioned the online culture they were brought up in. It asks: Who are we really when, online, we can be anyone? How can we heed control over our sexualities while being mass exposed to hypersexual online landscapes? How do we reconcile our digital selves with our physical selves? Can we? The work invites its audience on a surreal participatory journey through technology, queerness, and femme identity, leading them through a multimedia experience of live cinema, audio, and monologue. At once empowering and provocative, pensive and uncompromising, this is a show that’ll leave you questioning everything you’ve ever seen online — and everyone."
