IDARE Summer University 2026
INTERACTIVE DIGITAL ARTS, RESEARCH AND EDUCATION
April 27 – May 1:
In-Person and on Zoom
Eccentric Tools
for Brief,
Intense
Digital
Experiences
IDARESU 2026 will offer a suite of four day-long workshops involving hands-on exploration of weird and quirky tools that can be used for brief, intense digital experiences, both critical and creative.
The philosophy behind this year’s IDARESU is that valuable learning and outcomes can be achieved through tightly-focused and accessible digital tools. Anyone with basic computer skills can learn how to use these small tools to produce something interesting and worth sharing. The workshops will enable participants to work with sound, images, and interactive and generative text.
At a time when culture is threatened by a never-ending inundation of AI slop, we want to help people discover how they can bring the personal and the human to digital creativity and procedural authorship.
Participants may choose which days to attend (from one day to all days — see below). For IDARESU 2026 to count towards the Canadian Certificate in Digital Humanities/Certificat canadien en humanités numériques, participants must attend all five days.
If financial circumstances make payment of course fees challenging, please contact jason.boyd@torontomu.ca
IDARE Summer University, hosted by the Centre for Digital Humanities at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), offers learning opportunities in digital making for artistic, scholarly, and educational purposes. These opportunities are open to the TMU community and to the public.
"Pacman Pie" by Divyang Deep Tiwari, 2020
Monday
Instructor: Reg Beatty
Sound Work
This workshop is a wide-ranging survey of small tools for exploring sound. Taking some cues from early experimental music, as well as contemporary practitioners, we will examine the basis of sound creation and work with browser-based esoteric instruments, ambient sonic landscapes, voice, noise, field recording, and unplanned effects. We will play with sound and shape it into myriad patterns that blend consonance and dissonance.
This workshop is accessible to anyone curious about working with sound and no prior musical training or ability is required. Participants will only need to bring laptops and headphones (or earbuds.)
Reg Beatty is a bookbinder, book artist and designer. He has maintained a studio in Toronto since 1992, lectured at a variety of institutions, and taught bookarts and book design at OCADU, York University and Sheridan College. As project manager and in-house designer at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Centre for Digital Humanities, he helped create the new interface and content management system for Yellow Nineties 2.0. He received an MA in Communication and Culture at TMU/York, where his major project investigated the algorithmic book. His work has been exhibited in the United States, Europe, Japan, and across Canada.
Tuesday
Instructor: Jeremy Andriano
Making Strange Things with Twine
According to its website twinery.org, Twine is “an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.” However, as Twine’s creator Chris Klimas says, “you can also make things that nobody can quite pin down.” He admonishes potential Twine writers, “please make strange things with Twine.” Inspired by Klimas’ request, this workshop explores Twine as an eccentric tool for more personal kinds of writing, such as journaling, scrapbooking, note-taking, or letter writing.
In this session, we will first introduce Twine for new users, providing basic instructions for getting started. We will then work through a series of prompted writing exercises designed to highlight the ways that Twine can be used as a hypertext notebook for ‘scribbling,’ for jotting down your thoughts, recording a diary entry, or for sending a note to somebody you care about.
Jeremy Andriano (he/him) recently completed a Master of Arts in the joint graduate program in Communication and Culture at Toronto Metropolitan University and York University. His thesis research explored ways that digital tools such as Twine and Ink/Inky can be used to introduce hypertext writing in traditional creative writing workshop settings. He has an undergraduate degree in English, Honours (TMU 2023), is a frequent contributor to the Unarchived Podcast, and has taught multiple workshops on Ink/Inky for the Electronic Literature Organization. He is the author of Creating Playable Stories with Ink and Inky (2023).
Wednesday
Instructors: Jason Boyd and Richard Kevis
Wor(l)d Building
Interactive Fiction, as its name indicates, foregrounds the activity of interaction that becomes key to the reader’s navigation and experience of the work. In Wor(l)d Building, we will use Inform 7 to construct a storyspace — a textual simulation of a space that generates a story through the reader’s purposeful engagement. Participants will furnish an imagined and/or recreated space of their own with curious and personal objects to handle, striking views to contemplate, and intriguing things to listen to, all in a world made of words.
Jason Boyd is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at TMU, and the Director of the Centre for Digital Humanities. He regularly teaches a course called “Narrative in a Digital Age,” where students learn a variety of authoring platforms, including Inform 7, for the creation of playable stories. His essay, “Poetry as Code as Interactive Fiction: Engaging Multiple Text-Based Literacies in Scarlet Portrait Parlor” (2023), explored an Inform 7 work that is simultaneously a sonnet, a program, and an interactive fiction.
Richard Kevis (he/him) is an MA student in Literatures of Modernity at Toronto Metropolitan University and an incoming PhD candidate in the joint graduate program in Communication and Culture at TMU and York University. He holds an Honours Bachelor of Creative Writing and Publishing from Sheridan College. He has collaborated with 9th Level Games and has work published in their Level 0 anthology, and has recently worked with Media Lab Books on an upcoming Daggerheart supplement. His poetry appears in White Wall Review and Phylum Press, and he is the author of The Waltz of Blades and The Minuet of Sorcery. Richard is also offering research and logistical support at IDARESU 2026 as part of his Practicum placement in the Literatures of Modernity program
Thursday
Instructor: Reg Beatty
Glitching the Image
This workshop is about imperfection and an aesthetic approach rooted in errors (accidental or deliberate!) that utilize fragmentation, misalignment, and distortion, to look behind the veil of digital image-making. We will explore a collection of small browser-based tools that allow for the direct handling of pixels, as well as the creation and manipulation of images that can be stretched, bent, and shattered, in multiple and ingenious ways, all to disturb their smooth surfaces and challenge their perceived perfection.
See bio above...
"Showing Constraint" by rgb, 2026
Schedule
Each day we'll gather at the Library's Collaboratory (or on Zoom).
- 09:30-10:00: Breakfast
- 10:00-12:00: Class in session (coffee break at 11:00)
- 12:00-13:00: Lunch (on your own)
- 13:00-16:00: Class in session (coffee break at 14:00)
Friday morning we will finish up any projects for the afternoon showcase.
- 09:30-10:00: Breakfast
- 10:00-12:00: Final work session (coffee break at 11:00)
- 12:00-14:00: Catered lunch and IDARESU 2026 Showcase
Finding the Library Collaboratory:
The main entrance to the Library Collaboratory is via the SLC Building.
Elevator: Take the elevator (opposite the main entrance) up to the 3rd floor of the SLC Building. Exit and turn left: the Library Collaboratory is at the end of the hall, marked with large yellow doors.
Stairs: Take the main stairs (on the right of the entrance) up to the second floor. Keep to the right and follow the stairs up to the third floor. Walk past the DMZ and the DME to the end of the hall. The Library Collaboratory is at the end of the hall, marked with large yellow doors.
Resources
Sound Work
Making Strange Things with Twine
Wor(l)d Building
Glitching the Image
"Rossetti Interjection" by rgb, 2026
Code of Conduct
IDARESU strives to create welcoming environments that are anti-oppression, recognize intersectionalities, and work compassionately across difference. (Read our Code of Conduct)
©2026 Centre for Digital Humanities @ Toronto Metropolitan University