Director's Works
Corpus and the Wandering Jo Roy
Jo Roy is a Canadian filmmaker, transmedia artist and choreographer whose work bridges movement, cinema, and emerging technology. A systems thinker at heart, she creates films and installations that push the boundaries of technical possibility while examining ethical issues such as ecological collapse, media theory, and humane futurism. Jo's genre-defying work has been featured by institutions as diverse as Annecy Festival, SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica, Cannes Lions, WCSFP, NOWNESS, and the National Film Board of Canada. In the commercial world, Jo’s direction has generated over 100 million views, broken a Billboard record, and won numerous international awards, including two Cannes Lions. Her films have also been spotlighted by leading industry publications such as Ad Age, Vimeo Staff Picks, the British Council, CNN Create, Dance Magazine, and NPR. She continues to shape the future of storytelling by alchemizing her multi-faceted artistry into groundbreaking cinematic experiences.
Corpus and the Wandering was shot on iPhone and composed entirely of the artist’s own body. At once a self-portrait and a sprawling epic, the film transforms more than 50,000 hand-placed video layers into a 100-screen “videomosaic” wonderland of the Earth and beyond. The artwork explores media theory, ecology, existential spirituality, and the sovereignty of the female body, drawing on thinkers such as Guy Debord, Donna Haraway, and Byung-Chul Han. Using frozen breath, wrinkles, ashes, and cellulite to form everything from mycelial networks to black holes, Jo Roy practices radical vulnerability, using the flawed beauty of her body to illuminate her philosophical journey through grief, awe, and the simultaneous wonder and dread produced by the modern human experience. A fusion of technical innovation and poetic meditation, Corpus and the Wandering dares to ask how we can remove the walls of a fragmented society and repurpose tech in the image of mycelial kinship for a better future.
‘Corpus and the Wandering began with the feeling that something was wrong. Amidst ecological collapse and rising anxiety, we are paralyzed by chaos, struggling to stabilize our world while fundamentally alienated from one another. At the core of this isolation? The simple square. It is everywhere: our phones, windows, feeds, and video calls; the building block of our "grid society." Yet, the square is the structural antithesis of nature’s fractal interconnectedness; the psychological root of our estrangement from the Earth. Thus, I attempted to transform the grid itself using the organic curves and lines of my own body. For three years, as I created mushrooms, oceans, and lightning, I found myself in hilariously absurd scenarios: balancing on a broken space heater, using kitchen tongs to hang a light, and recreating a whale fin with my tongue threaded through a medical glove. The process was both harrowing and spiritually cathartic. Corpus and the Wandering is my soul in a grid.’
