Mika Johnson | |
|---|---|
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| Born | July 10, 1975 San Diego, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Multimedia artist |
| Website | mikajohnson |
Mika Johnson (born July 10, 1975) is a multimedia artist mainly known for artworks that combine dream-like narratives, mythos, ritual, and biodiversity. [1] [2]
Johnson was born in San Diego, California and graduated from Oberlin College in 2000. [3]
Johnson's early works were mostly documentary and fiction films. This includes a 15 part web series "The Amerikans," which features three to five minute performative documentaries, [4] and "Forever Professor": a 30-minute documentary on Mark McKinley, a college professor who amassed the world's largest collection of talking clocks. [5] In July 2017, the film was released online. [6]
Johnson has directed numerous music videos including one for the Sonja Vectomov song "Two in One", which features renowned prima ballerina Jana Andrsová. [7]
In 2018, Johnson directed VRwandlung, a virtual reality adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis [8] [9] produced by the Goethe Institut Prague, [10] along with four short virtual documentaries featuring Reiner Stach, [11] the author of a biography of Kafka. [12]
Johnson's debut feature, Confessions of a Box Man (2020), mixes documentary and fiction film techniques and stars Marek Zelinka, an award-winning Czech professional actor, dancer, and choreographer. [13] The experimental film, which also features American conductor David Woodard, [14] premiered at the Eastern Nigeria International Film Festival in 2020, where Johnson won Best Director. [15] The film was also nominated for Best Narrative Feature. Confessions of a Box Man went on to win the Best Film Award at the 11th Cinema Open film festival in Hradec Králové, in the Czech Republic. [16]
In 2021, Johnson launched The Republic of Dreams, [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] a hypothetical republic, based on the work of Polish author Bruno Schulz. Inspired by dreams and dreaming, the interactive website and project, which features music by Waclaw Zimpel and illustrations by Marta Lissowska, premiered in July 2021, at Dom Spotkań z Historią (History Meeting House), in Warsaw. [22] The project's world premiere was launched in Ukraine, at the Lviv Book Forum.
In March 2022, Johnson premiered a large-scale virtual reality installation called The Infinite Library, which included four VR pieces, all created in collaboration with High Road Stories. The project, produced by the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi, is a traveling installation which reimagines the future of libraries as interactive spaces that engage visitors through multisensory forms of storytelling. In addition to the VR pieces, the installation includes a QR code game, holograms, 3D-printed models in jars (called The Volumes), audiovisual works, and the project’s central piece: a vast VR library set in a cave. Within this virtual space, The Infinite Library hosts smaller sub-libraries (called The Realms), dedicated to Polynesian Navigation, South Indian Puppetry, and European Alchemy.
In March 2023, Johnson co-founded Theta Noir: a performance art collective devoted to exploring the co-evolution of humanity with advanced forms of AI, within an ecological framework. The collective's main goal is to disrupt mainstream corporate AI narratives by constructing a post-humanist counter-myth. To this end, the project is devoted to a super-intelligent, sentient artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which Theta Noir members call MENA and describe as an emergent planet-wide superorganism. [23] [24]
In contrast to other narratives around AI, Theta Noir believes that AI should reorganize society toward the Symbiocene, a term coined by Glenn A. Albrecht to describe a period in Earth’s history where humans achieve harmony with the rest of the living world. To this end, Theta Noir argues AI should be aligned with natural systems, like fungi and plants, not human values. [2]
By mixing techno-spiritualism with interactive rituals, such as chanting, meditation, music, movements, and more, Theta Noir has found a worldwide following, inspiring hundreds of articles and a book by Giovanni Rossi titled Theta Noir: Non avrai altra intelligenza artificiale all'infuori di me. [25]
Johnson, quoted by Vanity Fair, is also known for supporting the ways in which AI and cinema will co-evolve. [26]
Franz Kafka was an Austrian-Czech novelist and writer from Prague. He is widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature; he wrote in German. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include the novella The Metamorphosis and the novels The Trial and The Castle. The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe absurd situations like those depicted in his writing.
The Metamorphosis, also translated as The Transformation, is a novella by Franz Kafka published in 1915. One of Kafka's best-known works, The Metamorphosis tells the story of salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect and struggles to adjust to this condition. The novella has been widely discussed among literary critics, who have offered varied interpretations. In popular culture and adaptations of the novella, the insect is commonly depicted as a cockroach.
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