Caitlin Fisher

Caitlin Fisher is a Canadian media artist, poet, writer, and Professor of Cinema and Media Arts at York University in Toronto where she also directs the Immersive Storytelling Lab and the Augmented Reality Lab. Fisher is also a Co-founder of York’s Future Cinema Lab, former Fulbright and Canada Research Chair and an international award-winning digital storyteller. Creator of some of the world’s first AR poetry and long-from VR narratives. Fisher is also known for the 2001 hypermedia novel These Waves of Girls, and for her work creating content and software for augmented reality.

Career
Fisher joined the faculty of York University in 2000. serves as President of the Electronic Literature Organization and on the international Board of Directors for HASTAC - the Humanities, Arts, Technology, Alliance and Collaboratory. She recently completed an AI Storytelling project funded through the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Caitlin is also co-PI on a New Frontiers grant investigating Immersive digital environments and indigenous knowledges: co-creation in virtual reality environments and is just starting a new SSHRC-funded VR museum project, bringing the power of immersive storytelling to the global health crisis of antimicrobial resistance. She recently directed Fiery Sparks of Light, a volumetric XR project featuring iconic Canadian women poets (Atwood, Brossard, Tolmie, Lubrin). Produced with the participation of Telefilm Canada, 'Fiery Sparks of Light' is a CFC Media Lab and York University Immersive Storytelling Lab Co-Production in Partnership with Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry.

Caitlin Fisher is the Canada Research Chair in Digital Culture in the Faculty of Fine Arts, York University, Toronto. She is a co-founder of York's Future Cinema Lab, and Director of York's Augmented Reality Lab. Fisher sits on the executive of the Centre for Information Visualization and Data-Driven Design.

Fisher is the author of Canada's first born-digital hypertextual dissertation.

Fisher became president of the Electronic Literature Organization in 2022.

Reception
The Electronic Literature Organization awarded its fiction award to These Waves of Girls in 2001. Larry McCaffery, the award juror, wrote: "I found myself hooked on Waves from the moment I first logged on and watched Caitlin's gorgeous graphic interface assemble itself out of images of moving clouds drifting across the screen, mingling with the sounds of girls laughing." In the abstract for a critical review of Fisher's project, Raine Koskimaa writes, "These Waves is a class-room example of the so-called associative hypertext. The hypertextual structure is also closely linked to the problematics of autobiographical narration. As readers we get to ponder about the nature of remembering, of telling stories about one’s life. One of the genuine accomplishments of Fisher’s work is to bring forth these questions in a tangible, and still discreet, way."

The work is taught in undergraduate literature courses and is referenced in the scholarship as a highly influential example of early multimodal web-based hypertext fiction. Fisher is described as having "established herself at the forefront of digital writing" with These Waves of Girls (2001) and the augmented reality poem Andromeda (2008).

The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 2 describes Fisher's Andromeda, "Andromeda is both a physical children's book and a digital book with AR codes that needs to be read with the use of a webcam. The human reader shows the book to the machine, and the machine reads the code that is provided in the cards that are attached to the pop-ups. The human reader then sees on the screen what the computer has in a sense translated into human languages. The complexity of reading and the double process of decoding is thus one of the more interesting and significant issues of the project. The use of a children's book in the project is significant because the symbolic process that takes place while reading the text is linked to the diegetic scene of a mother and a child reading a fairy tale."

Creative works

 * Andromeda
 * Everyone at the Party is Dead
 * These Waves of Girls is an early, web based hypertext with interrelated stories that can be read in multiple orders and ways.

Awards
Her novella, These Waves of Girls, won the International Electronic Literature Award for Fiction in 2001. Her poem, Andromeda, shared the International Vinaròs Prize for Electronic Literature in the digital poetry category in 2008. An early version of Circle was shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize in 2011.