[Image: Kate Armstrong & Michael Tippett / Grafik Dynamo / 2004-2005] Kate Armstrong is a Vancouver-based artist and theorist with a panache for new media powered permutational storytelling. Her work questions the nature of narrative in light of computation, social media and contemporary urban space. She has exhibited widely and is currently en route to Turkey for the March 8th launch of PATH, a bookwork generated by “an anonymous individual living in the city of Montreal between 2005-2007″ at the Akbank Art Centre in Istanbul. Above and beyond her creative practice, she is the author of Crisis and Repetition: Essays on Art and Culture, sits on the board at The Western Front artist-run centre and is a lecturer at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts + Technology.

An obvious starting point in any line of questioning about your work would be the primacy of text. The vast majority of your projects could be described as machines for making fiction and you’ve explored storytelling through found documents, the blogosphere and social media, and even as a geo-locative phenomena. This list of work more closely resembles a bibliography than any conventional understanding of the word portfolio. Could you talk about your relationship with storytelling and why it is a driving force in your work?

I love your comment about the notion of machines for making fiction. It’s so apt that it draws me away from the word “storytelling”. I love stories, but there is always something in the concept of a story that to me indicates a kind of finish, and what I like to do is to play with alternatives to that. I like it when ideas are in play, and when writing is tight and elegant, and when there is something active that is taking place in terms of how the writing is compiled. This active element can be anything - mechanical, computational, physical, algorithmic, activity on the part of the reader… Continued.