ILIOS: a VR meditation on the Coronavirus pandemic is a talk on the creation and distribution of a VR piece, conceived during the global shutdown, when Johnson was stuck in North America, for three months. The resulting piece, created remotely, was a meditation and conversation intended to discuss the meaning of COVID-19 in the artists’ personal lives.
Mika Johnson is a multimedia artist interested in dream-like narratives, mythos, ritual, and biodiversity. While his concentration is designing XR experiences, Johnson also works in many other mediums, including as a director for fiction and documentary projects. He is the director of the award winning feature film Confessions of a Box Man, along with a documentary web series titled The Amerikans, which showcases 15 people from Ohio, all through stories that are co-authored by their participants. Present works include The Republic of Dreams: a website and traveling installation produced by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw, which adapts the literary worlds of Bruno Schulz; The Infinite Library: a virtual library, produced by the Goethe-Institut, New Delhi, which uses nature and evolution to weave together various knowledge systems from around the world, including micro-libraries on South Indian shadow puppetry, Polynesian navigation, and Western European alchemy. Projects in production include the companion pieces Lost Forms and Found Forms. Produced by Expanded Focus in Leipzig, the former will allow users to interact with a fully scanned iceberg off the eastern coast of Greenland. Its companion piece, Found Forms, will allow users to travel beneath a virtual point cloud forest, where users can interact with the complex relationships formed between mushrooms, trees, plants, and their associated mycorrhizal networks. Together with Marcel Karnapke, Johnson is also the creator of an artistic feature on the Dawn Chorus phone app, which invites people around the world to record and share their local morning bird song and make an important contribution to biodiversity research. The artistic feature, called Sonic Feather, allows you to get creative with your dawn chorus recording. Johnson is also making music with artist and composer Daniel Vlcek in a project which takes its inspiration from mushrooms and mycelium. For more information: mikajohnson.com