Portfolio of Julianna Johnston
Select Works from 2019-2025
 


The Eyes, 2022

The Eyes, 2022
Performance and Video Work. Performance runtime 35 minutes.

The Eyes uses a combination of the body- our original technology– and new media to refract the surveillance state through the myth of Io and Argus Panoptes. A giant covered entirely with eyes reimagined as a singular being covered with 20 cell phones, Panoptes is the panopticon embodied. The work traces Io's journey to regain body sovereignty as they navigate the fervent digital landscape of Argus’ simultaneous visions.  



synonym for a circle, 2023




synonym for a circle, 2023
Interactive Kinetic Sculpture and VR Work.

synonym for a circle is an interactive virtual reality experience that simulates a circle dance through user interaction with a kinetic sculpture. Allowing the viewer to engage in a dance of connection and disconenction. Inside the virtual reality, viewers are guided to hold hands with digital bodies, in turn, the viewers raise their hands and find two metal handholds. The VR then prompts viewers to move with digital dancers spinning in a circle, as the viewer begins to turn the sculpture spins guiding the viewer safely around the circle. Eventually, the digital circle dance ascends into the sky leaving the main viewer dislocated on the ground.



tether to, 2024

tether to, 2024Performances and Media Installation. Performance runtime 35 minutes.
tether to is a performance that explores the numerous ways we are tethered to each other, our devices, and the refracted present playing back upon itself. A dance of screens and thumbs.  The screens are a window, and when rotated reveal the past seen from a multitude of perspectives but never fully within view. The performance builds off of the Touch(ing) Screen workshop, which explores the relationship between digital and physical touch. In this performance, performers eventually are transformed into hands, becoming the embodiment of the scroll.







Touch(ing) Screen, 2024


Touch(ing) Screen, 2024
Ongoing Workshop and Video Work.

A touch workshop using custom made touch screens alongside their personal devices to help participants synesthetically remap touch back into their thumbs, training them to touch images, and feel digital bodies. Inspired by Montessori early education touch tablets, the workshop incrementally introduces more complex textures to retrain the sensation of touch back into our mono-textured screens.






Vibrating Waiting for You to Touch, 2025


Vibrating Waiting for You to Touch, 2025 Multimedia Performance (45 minute runtime)

A mixed-reality performance that explores the sensorial and emotional experience of scrolling. It is a dance of scrolling thumbs—thumbs attached to hands performed by whole people. Through movement, sound, and absurdist costuming, props, and embodied exploration, the piece investigates how our bodies are disciplined by digital systems and how the intimate act of touch becomes flattened into functionality. This work asks: how do we touch a digital body? And can touch rehumanize the dehumanized scroll?




Intimacy for the Apocalypse, 2025
Intimacy for the Apocalyse, 2025
Performance, Runtime: 60mins, Human Resources Gallery, Los Angeles

A collaboration with choreographer Emily Barasch. In Intimacy for the Apocalypse, an unstable structure made of rope, slime, wooden levers, buckets, and streamers shifts over time as four dancers and a sound composer develop emergent, co-constituted logics to find stability and support within their material conditions. As the performers engage in gestural looping, tuning scores, and task-based scenarios, they develop new relational practices for embodied logics of survival. Intimacy for the Apocalypse investigates how bodies and environments can be reoriented out of collapse, giving way to intra- dependent speculative futures. It stages a world where bodies refuse categorization, shifting between discipline and defiance, chaos and clarity, desire and tension.






[H.E.R.D.]

[ H E R D ]: an educational tool
was developed over the course of several trips to the farm of local Swiss sheep farmers, Franz and Silvia Rouss. During these visits, I was able to observe the daily farm routines, and learned about their self-designed sheep archive, which included a handwritten logbook of all the sheep’s ear tags from last 20 years. I learned to milk each sheep, and filmed their movements.

In an effort to identify individual sheep within the heard, I developed my own catalog and facial tracking system. With the help of Franz Rouss, I utilized the milking process to document every individual within the herd. The resulting installation [H.E.R.D]: an educational tool includes a composite video of all of the herd being milked simultaneously, and a log book that identifies each sheep’s tag number, milking group, and milking position, as well as observational notes that document each sheep’s mobility, and general attitude. Alongside this, is a video of the facial tracking software identify specific sheep grazing in the field, and the barn. A corresponding worksheet allows viewers to test their identification abilities, by matching individual sheep to their tracking color. Audio plays over the installation identifying individual sheep ‘bahs’, and photos of the sheep tags hang on a small ladder from the farm. Finally, a sample of sheep’s wool, and several different samples of sheep’s milk are also displayed.
Shout Vote


Public Shout-Vote, 2019
Interactive Performance and Installaiton

The first public shout vote held in Lichtensteig, Switzerland. Using a new auditory voting booth, voters collectively shout to indicate their voting preference. There is no limit to the volume of the shouted vote, or the number of votes that can be shouted by any individual. Trained ears count the votes heard live on their hand above the crowd. Results are announced after every vote. After the preliminary ballot, the public proposed referendums to be voted upon. To ensure the integrity of the vote, each vote is recorded and a thorough recount promised. The recount, a durational performance, took place in the gallery for three weeks after the public shout vote. An audio recording from one shout vote was hand painted on a 6’ x 18’ canvas stretched on the gallery wall. One second of audio was represented in each foot of the canvas. Vote counters slowly worked through the audio, marking each vote on the canvas while listening to the shout vote audio on repeat.

This project was inspired by research into the voting system used in the neighboring village of Appenzal. Continuing on tradition, Appenzal town members gather in the public square and vote simply by raising their hand. Town leaders scan the crowd visually from a podium to assess roughly which option more hands preferred. Rarely, if the vote is too close, hands from the crowd will be individually counted. Shocked by the transparency and immediacy of Appenzal’s voting method, I tried to create an alternative voting method that refracted the voting experience in the United States of America. The result, Shout Vote took place in Lichtensteig on the same day that the neighboring town of Appenzal gathered to hold their public vote.




LiveStreamDérive, 2019

LiveStreamDérive, 2019
3-Channel Video Installation

In the video installation LiveStreamDérive non-localized voices control a silver body to explore a lush green landscape. Like a psuedo-video game, the installtion shows three first-person views. At times the player’s experiences convene, allowing the landscape to align and then schism as their paths diverge. With no mission or narrative the game is transformed into a digital dérive in which the players unpredictably try to push the limits of the silver body. Like an avatar, the body is almost always obedient. The video work positions the * viewer * in a third room: neither aligned with the silver body nor aligned with the position of the player. This way you can observe how the controller and controlled handle different versions of the same scenario. The whole construction is as much a work of art as a (pseudo-) scientific experiment to research how technology can be a mediator of human trust, or maybe of sadomasochistic control - depending on how it works.



r/Generative-Isolation, 2020



r/Generative-Isolation, 2020
Participatory Performance and 360 Video Work. Video runtime 7 minutes. 

This crowdsourced installation was created during the early months of the COVID Pandemic as part of a digital residency hosted by MassGallery in Austin, TX. The gallery issued an open call, inviting viewers to virtually enter my studio space. From their remote locations, participants used vocal commands to direct a human avatar to explore the studio. Using various materials and tools stowed around the space, participants created new work or continued the work of prior participants, often leaving prompts and surprises for others to discover.

Each participant’s first person view was then mapped onto a 360° rendering of the studio. In the final virtual reality, viewers can witness the concurrent experiences of each participant. The remote viewer is intimately immersed in a narrative recreation of the isolated acts of collaboration. With the added mobility of a VR environment, viewers can follow individual threads of interaction or bask in the simultaneous fluid manipulation of the space by remote participants.



Schematics of Attention, 2023




Schematics of Attention, 2023
Performance and Multi-Media Installation

Schematics of Attention is a dance of screens that diagrams the fractured and fervent experience of seeing today. In the immersive media performance, dancers rotate and spin monitors to reveal and obstruct video footage of a previous performance in the space only accessible by screen. The screens are a window, and when rotated reveal the past seen from a multitude of perspectives but never fully within view. After the performance, the installation is open for viewer interaction.






Tethered, 2022



Tethered, 2022
Interactive Multimedia Installation 

Tethered is an immersive projection and sound installation that is controlled by the gameplay of a tetherball match. Visuals and sound are generated live based on the position of the ball and progress of gameplay. 


emergent technologies, 2021


Community Based Emergent Technologies, 2021
Interactive Video Essay played on 15 Cellphones

An interactive video essay played across 15 cellphones that explores community based emergent technologies through an examination of the concept of emergence, as described in Manuel DeLanda’s ‘Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason’. Combining theory and praxis the video essay prompts participants to rearrange the phones based on diagrams to reveal images and videos that exemplify forms of emergence and community based emergent technologies.

The video essay concludes with an attempt to create emergence. The phones display wooden sticks that must be arranged into a pile. Viewers are prompted to rub their hands above the sticks to help ignite a fire that emerges between them. 



You Held the Door, 
a Dodecahedron Formed, 2021




You Held the Door, a Dodecahedron Formed, 2021
Interactive Media Installation Activated by Movement Artists
Movement Artists: Crescent, Selene Phillips, Abby Baldwin 
Sound Collaborator: Davis Polito

You Held the Door, a Dodecahedron Formed utilizes body tracking to translate the physical and emotional distance between users into infographic representations. The work co-opts the language of the Sociogram, an infographic used to track the evolution of relationships within social groups. Red lines delineate the shifting spatial distance between bodies. An abstract soundscape is controlled live by the distance between bodies, the number of bodies detected, and their spatial positioning. The work ponders the representation of relationships while creating a space for relations to form. This work was shown at an Interactive Art and Experimental Sound exhibition. Movement artists activated the interactive media Installation for a 30-minute performance, at all other times the work was open for the public to interact with. 
This project was completed with support from The Frank-Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry.


Embodying Data Workshop Series, 2016-2019

Embodying Data Workshops, 2017-2019Ongoing Workshop Series

Using the language of infographics, improvisation exercises and choreographic constraints participants work collectively to chart graphic interpretations of interpersonal relations, current events, economic happenings, and poetry.









Group-Geometry, 2019



Group-Geometry, 2019
Performance Lecture

A public lesson in Group-geometry, a community building and group stretching practice based on the principles of geometry. Illustrated on the board is the plane between two workshop participants. The participants are asked to describe the plane in seeable and un-seeable units of measurement. 


Group-Geometry Artist Book, 2019
Realize the form you are and constitute your relations with others. Learn how to make a cylinder with people.