Once More, Once More is an animated piece set to a bittersweet rendition of Britney Spears’ “Baby One More Time,” a song dug up from the garbage of American pop culture. Armstrong attempts to give it new life both by singing the tune and by examining what made it so powerful and memorable through image making. It is an experiment in storytelling, a study of time and visual language from the perspective of someone raised on the Internet, constantly clicking, taking in data, repeating and reloading.

Her work has, for the past several years, revolved around the creation of hand drawn animations paired with intimate audio recordings. The nature of animation, video or any other kind of time-based media, lends itself very well to storytelling, but she aims to challenge the way that stories are told.

“Perhaps my issue is that time is so expansive, and the events of a human life so complicated, overwhelming, and beautiful, that I worry there is no way to tell a story and accurately capture what existence is really, truly like. Only recently have I come to realize that a good storyteller is like a good curator, they choose events and arrange them together in an engaging way. A good story, or a good work of art, says much more than it states plainly—it’s a kind of divine simplification that somehow maintains a fullness beyond itself. My work searches for this fullness.”