https://mikajohnson.com www.mikajohnson.com Sat, 07 Feb 2026 16:47:56 +0000 https://mikajohnson.com en https://mikajohnson.com/Footer Sat, 17 Nov 2018 18:03:45 +0000 www.mikajohnson.com https://mikajohnson.com/Footer Experience Aika – Tuuli&nbsp;(2025), Helsinki Deisng Week © 2026 Mika Johnson. All Rights Reserved. https://mikajohnson.com/Sonic-Feather-1 Mon, 02 Feb 2026 12:00:06 +0000 www.mikajohnson.com https://mikajohnson.com/Sonic-Feather-1 Sonic Feather (2020)Sonic Feather (2020)Sonic Feather is part of Dawn Chorus: an ongoing international sound art and ecological listening project led by Bernie Krause, a pioneering bioacoustician whose work has fundamentally shaped how we understand soundscapes, biodiversity, and the acoustic health of ecosystems. The project invites participants around the world to record the early-morning soundscape of birds at their local sunrise, creating a collective archive of place, season, and ecological presence at a time when many species are under increasing threat. Co-authored by multimedia artists Marcel Karnapke and Mika Johnson, Sonic Feather is a custom-made digital tool developed for Dawn Chorus participants, allowing them to transform their recordings into unique visual animations that can be shared online. The project is inspired by the idea that scientific data, when translated and reimagined, can also become art, and that this moment calls for closer collaboration between scientists and artists to raise awareness of the accelerating loss of biodiversity. Sonic Feather echoes the logic of digital painting tools, with one crucial difference: its brush emits sound rather than color. By touching the screen, users activate their recording and begin to draw with audio. The phone becomes a two-dimensional canvas where gestures such as painting, writing, or playing are applied to sound instead of pigment. As the audio is uncoupled from linear time, it becomes an image shaped by the user’s interaction, producing a visual form that is both personal and unrepeatable. This transformation allows participants to engage with the sounds of the dawn chorus in ways that traditional audio playback cannot. In this way, Sonic Feather offers yet another perspective on listening, encouraging people to see, hear, think, and feel differently about birdsong, soundscapes, and the fragile ecosystems they belong to. https://mikajohnson.com/Survival-Songs-1 Mon, 02 Feb 2026 12:00:14 +0000 www.mikajohnson.com https://mikajohnson.com/Survival-Songs-1 Sonic Feather (2020) <img width="1116" height="1114" width_o="1116" height_o="1114" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4091c9d8f37883db1c6597cc304635105f7c11c3e787f26dcee67eee414022ec/Screenshot-2026-02-02-at-1.58.33PM.png" data-mid="244551772" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4091c9d8f37883db1c6597cc304635105f7c11c3e787f26dcee67eee414022ec/Screenshot-2026-02-02-at-1.58.33PM.png" />Link Graphic design by Jakub Tranta / Daisy With Rider Survival Songs is a haunting audiovisual series by multimedia artists Marcel Karnapke and Mika Johnson, inspired by Dawn Chorus. By pairing nine iconic Dawn Chorus bird species with stories about their threats, Survival Songs seeks to create an awareness around the dangers that birds face everywhere. Made up of nine videos, each 66 seconds in length, the works are intended as portals to a single event, 66 million years ago, when the Earth was hit by an asteroid roughly 10 km across, causing the fifth mass extinction. Due to the destructive force of this impact, the climate was radically altered, which led to the extinction of three-fourths of all living species. This included all of the dinosaurs except one, ‘birds’.In the midst of the sixth mass extinction, this one caused by humans, Survival Songs asks us to hear the songs of birds as echoes of their evolution. To represent this, the bird songs have been stretched, mutated so as to unlock their sonic mysteries in time. Meanwhile, an animation of each bird’s eye mimics their evolution, each second equalling one million years. Whether birds make it through this present mass extinction, the Anthropocene, is in part up to us humans, as we alone have the power to research and respond to the worldwide threats to birds. https://mikajohnson.com/The-Republic-of-Dreams Sat, 07 Feb 2026 16:47:56 +0000 www.mikajohnson.com https://mikajohnson.com/The-Republic-of-Dreams The Republic Dreams (2021) The Republic of Dreams is a multi-phase project adapting the literary world of Bruno Schulz through sound, light, and immersive experience, all rooted in dreams and dreaming. The project began as an online release, during the COVID-19 lockdowns, featuring 18 sonic works by sound designers Eli Stine and Jackson Bierfeldt, accompanied by an illustrated map by Marta Lissowska and music by Wacław Zimpel. Designed to induce sleep and dream states, these works invite audiences to enter Schulz’s Republic through their own imaginations, drawing inspiration from ASMR, binaural sound, meditation practices, lucid dreaming, and hypnosis. In its second phase, The Republic of Dreams became a traveling, site-specific audio installation with light and projection, hosted by institutions and events for small groups. Many of the sonic works are available exclusively through this physical installation. A forthcoming third phase will involve collaboration with Polish artists to create a site-specific immersive exhibition. Alongside immersive audio, the exhibition will feature an on-site sleep clinic inspired by Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, where visitors can observe their brain activity during sleep and dreaming and receive a printed record of their experience. Project site https://mikajohnson.com/Infinite-Library-1 Mon, 02 Feb 2026 12:31:40 +0000 www.mikajohnson.com https://mikajohnson.com/Infinite-Library-1 The Infinite Library (2022) The Infinite Library is a traveling installation that reimagines the future of libraries as interactive spaces that engage visitors through multisensory forms of storytelling. It seeks to embed human stories within a much grander narrative, one that includes the birth of our planet and the evolution of all life forms. The ‘Library’ part of the installation is conceived as a living organism, a kind of embodiment of knowledge that introduces itself to visitors personally before inviting them to explore its house. 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. The Infinite Library launched with its World Premiere in March 2022 in New Delhi, India. The Infinite Library was produced by the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller/Bhavan New Delhi, High Road Stories, and Daisy with Rider Productions. The installation consists of the main experience (around 15 minutes), which uses the Valve Index VR headset, within a 2 x 2 meters sandbox; 3 Oculus Quest II headsets for the sub-libraries (4 minutes each), audiovisual works, 3D-printed objects, and plants. Project websiteExperience website Project Instagram https://mikajohnson.com/ILIOS-1 Mon, 02 Feb 2026 09:35:09 +0000 www.mikajohnson.com https://mikajohnson.com/ILIOS-1 ILIOS (2020) ILIOS is a meditation on the state of flux we are all living in today: a moment where patterns emerge only to change in such rapid succession that normality can only be assumed in short bursts. The project evolved as a correspondence between artists Marcel Karnapke and Mika Johnson during the COVID-19 shutdown after a digital project they were working on was put on hold, due to Johnson being stranded all spring in North America. The two artists continued to communicate, discussing the meaning of the shut down and COVID-19 in their personal lives. ILIOS is the result of that conversation. https://mikajohnson.com/Music-for-Mycelium Mon, 02 Feb 2026 09:12:58 +0000 www.mikajohnson.com https://mikajohnson.com/Music-for-Mycelium Music for Mycelium (2020) Music for Mycelium is an electronic piece of music inspired by mycorrhizal fungi—structures that mycologist Paul Stamets has called “Earth’s natural internet” for their ability to form vast networks that enable trees and other plants to exchange information, including warnings and nutrients. Because this natural network is almost entirely underground, scientific inquiry has been limited. The mushrooms we see on the surface are merely the fruiting bodies, like the tip of a massive iceberg. For this reason, we use music with the hope of creating a form of interspecies communication with these fungal networks, so vast that they dwarf anything in the human world in both density and complexity. If the planet is alive, as we believe, why not try to speak with it? Originally conceived in February 2021, Music for Mycelium was first played live for the plant, animal, and fungal communities in a pine forest in Sumava. As part of Links. Contact in the mushroom network, an online event produced by Stiftung Kunst and Natur, the performance aired in early March, accompanied by visuals of the forest captured in laser scans by Marcel Karnapke.