Biography
Ed S. Johnston is a computational artist and designer working across moving image, digital fabrication, and immersive installation. His work investigates how temporal sequences can be translated into digital and physical forms through computational processes and spatial modeling. Drawing on recorded imagery and data, Johnston explores relationships among lived time, memory, and attention. His practice treats temporal passage as expressive material, producing artifacts that can be encountered spatially and shared.
Across his studio practice and collaborative research, Johnston examines how computational and immersive media can bring recorded experience, spatial histories, and cultural information into embodied encounters. He leads and collaborates on extended reality and cultural heritage projects that support public engagement, spatial storytelling, and experiential design research.
Johnston’s work has been presented in exhibitions, screenings, and academic conferences, and his research has appeared in publications addressing computational art, moving image, extended reality, and experiential design. He has received artist grants from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, exhibited with ACM SIGGRAPH, and was named to the Lumen Prize 50 Shortlist, through which his work toured internationally. Collaborative projects he co-directed have received a Viddy Platinum Award and a New York Emmy nomination. He is an Associate Professor in the Robert Busch School of Design at Kean University’s Michael Graves College.
Artist Statement
My work begins with video I record while moving through landscapes. In my recent series Lucid Voxelations, a drive through autumn trees becomes a sequence of openings in the sky selected from individual frames. I trace these shapes and sample their colors. I then position, extend, and connect them along a spatial timeline to create animations and sculptural forms. As I work, I navigate the spatial and temporal relationships among these elements, developing distinct formal connections. The resulting structures function as expressive, symbolic models of the recorded journey, carrying forward selected relationships of shape, color, sequence, and duration. Through these decisions, I use the passage of time both as material for constructing distinct spatial forms and as a mode of artistic expression.