Anna Jacobson. Juried Artist
Constellations
WebXR on the Styly platform
Artist Statement
This AR Styly platform leads to my interactive version of ‘How to Knit a Human’ online.‘How to Knit a Human – the Interactive Version’ was created with choice-based digital storytelling, through the Twine platform. The creative process for the interactive version began with my adaptation of my memoir manuscript. As I developed this piece of electronic literature, I incorporated the visual along with the text, creating my own animations, drawings, and scans for an immersive experience. The reader can engage in these parts of my story and actively participate in the losing and regaining of agency through my narrative perspective, to gain a better understanding of my experience. As a result, this work could also benefit mental health professionals as an important resource, to empathise with one example of a patient’s journey through the psychiatric hospital system. Through the digital form, I allowed my experience to travel beyond what a traditional text can do by utilising multiple choices that link to different alternatives and possibilities that exist in my memory. By taking power in my own valuable lived experience, I aim to reduce the stigma in wider society, and institutions. My memoir ‘How to Knit a Human’ was published with NewSouth Publishing in 2024.
Styly link: How to Knit a Human – the Interactive Version (via AR)
About the artists
Anna Jacobson is an award-winning writer and artist from Meanjin (Brisbane). Anna’s memoir How to Knit a Human was published with NewSouth in 2024. Amnesia Findings (UQP, 2019), her first full-length poetry collection, won the 2018 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. Her second illustrated poetry collection is Anxious in a Sweet Store (Upswell, 2023). She was awarded the 2023 Fryer Library Fellowship and was the recipient of the Nillumbik Prize for Contemporary Writing, a Queensland Writers Fellowship, and a Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award. Anna was shortlisted in the 2022 Poetry and Digital Innovation Categories in the Woollahra Digital Literary Award. Her highest qualification is a Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing from QUT (2023). She was a finalist in the 65th Blake Art Prize, 2019 Marie Ellis OAM Prize for Drawing and 2009 Olive Cotton Award for Photographic Portraiture.
Credits: Anna Jacobson