“We are animals and we’re living as if we are machines.”
In the winter of 2025, Ani Castillo lived in Kingston as Queen’s Writer-in-Residence. Before she arrived, she contacted the Sisters of Providence, a convent located on Church Street and asked them if she could stay with them during her residency.
The Sisters denied her request, but it made Castillo think about why she wanted to move into a convent in the first place. She found that her main reason was to avoid distractions, thus removing any barriers to creating art.
Castillo also reached out to the convent out of a desire to protect herself from the dating world, in which she’d been deeply immersed since her divorce.
Out of that, The Digital Convent was born. The Convent is Castillo’s personal experiment, where she removes social media from the equation to focus solely on creating art. The process is documented in her “Letters” from The Digital Convent on her Substack.
In an interview with The Journal, Castillo said that she asked herself: “How can I protect myself, first from the dating world, because it’s so exhausting, but also from distraction?” Castillo vowed to only use the internet for work, art, and education, to create art every day, and to connect with other human beings.
Castillo felt that she was consistently consuming what the internet had to offer without digesting anything. In “LETTER #1 From The Digital Convent,” she wrote that “the worst of it all is that; / I DID NOT REMEMBER the majority of the stuff I had just consumed! / It slid from my memory completely, like it never happened.”
Castillo’s constant scrolling impacted her mood and always made her feel worse than before. She would ask herself, “How much is my mood worth that I’m just giving it away?” and “What would it be if I didn’t hijack it or affect it through these things?”
Castillo later told The Journal that these consumption habits were taking away from not only the amount she created, but her passion for making art in general.
“I started remembering how when I was very young, I used to think about art the most in my life,” Castillo said. “And I realized how things have been taking away from my life as an artist.”
The Digital Convent’s goal is protecting Castillo from external distractions by focusing on creating and being consumed, not by social media, but by the things that she loves. In that area, Castillo has been successful, creating a new work of art every day since November 2025.
Although The Digital Convent’s vows outlined that she would share her art with others, not everything reached the public eye. After experiencing health challenges, Castillo found that she was not in the right space to share what she was creating.
Despite this, she still made art every day. Not everything was a huge masterpiece, but it didn’t matter. If she was making something, she was doing a service to herself as an artist.
“If you write a little thing at the end of the day, you feel even a little percentage better even if the world feels impossible,” she said. “It really helps you because you’re honouring your own voice for a moment.”
She also agreed to maintain human connections, which she believes is best done in person. There is no hierarchy of connections, but the ones kept online can’t be as close as in-person ones, which Castillo believes can be more meaningful.
“I feel like all the connections are important but being in person […] is a superior way of communication and transmission of emotions and everything, when we’re in the presence of other living creatures,” Castillo said.
Although some of Castillo’s closest relationships are maintained through the phone because of distance, she recognizes the power of being near another person, saying, “when we go out, and we are in the presence of other people, we’re witnessing the miracle of life.”
A side-effect of The Digital Convent was boredom, but Castillo didn’t mind. She believes that boredom breeds creation, which is exactly what happened in her case. Her outdoor art on display at the corner of Princess and King Streets was created because she had nothing else to do that day.
“Even the fact that I gave myself the opportunity to get bored gives open space for me to do new things,” Castillo said. “We need more boring moments because it’s in those moments that you hear your voice.”
Ultimately, The Digital Convent turned the volume up on Castillo internal voice, sparking creativity and making her more attuned with her body and mind.
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