David (Jhave) Johnston

Bio

David Jhave Johnston is a digital poet working in emergent domains. Author of ReRites (Anteism, 2019) and Aesthetic Animism (MIT Press, 2016). He has been working as a media artist in the online and offline literary and art worlds since the 1990s. He is currently an AI-narrative researcher at the UiB Centre for Digital Narrative (2023–26) with the Extending Digital Narrative project.

Links

UiB employee page
Research profile on https://nva.sikt.no
Home page: glia.ca

Published/Exhibited

• "Place #8" – Janvier / January 2026  |  ReRites featured by invitation in 'une revue d’art animée par des artistes'
• "Extending Digital Narrative with AI, Games, Chatbots, and XR: How Experimental Creative Practice Yields Research Insights" |  Humanities 15, no. 1: 17, 2026
• "Brain Knot Altar" |   exhibited at USF Verftet, in cooperation with Bergen International Film Festival as part of the Eye for AI Cinema. Oct 15-23, 2025
• "Artificial Consciousness: Regenerating AI Ethics and Aesthetics" |  panel at Media Art History 2025 (Manizales, Colombia). May 6, 2025
• "ReRites" exhibited at Jeu du Paume, Paris |  as part of 'The World Through AI,' April-Sept. 2025
• "Writing with the Machine: AI and Poetic Creation" a commissioned video-lecture for Versopolis |  April 8, 2025
• "Identity Upgrade (Episode 2)" exhibited at Samek Art Museum  |  as part of 'FOR YOU: The Comfortable Alienation of AI', Jan 22 – March 30, 2025
• "Difference Indifference" |  CounterText 10, no. 3, February 13, 2025
• "ReRites" in Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023 |  Edited by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort, MIT Press, 2024
• "Identity Upgrade" & "Hallucinations are (almost) all you Need" |  exhibited at 'More Than Meets AI' (Kunstgarasjen & USF Verftet), Sept 20-Oct 24, 2024
• "Artist Presentation" at 'From Cinematic Realism to Extended Reality: Reformulating Screen Studies at the Precipice of Hyper-reality' |  at Trinity College Dublin, June 4-5, 2024
• "Embodied AI: An Extended Data Definition" |  Electronic Book Review, November 5, 2023
• "Introducing the Center for Digital Narrative" |  exhibition at University of Bergen, Oct 2023

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Ongoing

• AI-Updates
  [dynamically refreshed set of interdisciplinary AI links sorted by tags] (Aug 2025 - ongoing)

Works

• Anti-Work: A one-day comparison between Google's Antigravity and Anthropic's Cowork (Jan 23, 2026)
• AI in 2026: when the ineffable becomes algorithmically tractable (Jan 10, 2026)
• 75 Days (of music created with Suno) (Oct 13, 2025 — Dec 25, 2025)
• BOAMCO: Speculations about the Digitization of Music in the Age of AI (Dec 1, 2025)
• LATENT_SPACE_ENGINE v6.0 - Text-to-Music Prompt Assistant (Nov 27, 2025)
• Can you Copium? - A weekend exploration into AI manufactured memes. (Nov 22-23, 2025)
• Asking 4 chatbots to examine non-duality scientifically (Nov 20, 2025)
• AI Narrative Interiority (2-hour test of Gemini 3 and Grok 4.1. Nov 19, 2025)
• Weird Morph Tunnels (One day test of text over video. Oct 20, 2025)
• BRAIN-KNOT-ALTAR: Multi-Screen AI-Video Installation (Exhibited at USF, Bergen. Oct 15-23, 2025)
• 71 days (of Music Created in Suno) (Oct 8, 2025)
• Liferature: The Genomic AI Turn (Sept 20, 2025)
• I See Myself: 8 prompts, 3 different generators, 1 meditation on self (Sept 18, 2025)
• Intercultural Micro‑Story Research Pack (a one-day project made with GPT-5 on Sept 5, 2025)
• The Center for Neuromorphic Literature: Live Feed (Sept 4, 2025)
• Human AI: When the Merge comes it will feel Normal [1min video made in 2.5 hours](Aug 31, 2025)
• Money & Art: A foundational enquiry (slides from 2014 synthesized by AI on Aug 1, 2025)
• We are The Signal: "I personally would rather be ruled by an A.I...." (July 25, 2025)
• The Revolution Will Be Monetized [SUBTITLED] (July 21, 2025)
• (Un)(Very)Listenable Music (June - July 24, 2025)
• The Age of Murmuration (an AI-created AI-art manifesto) (June 29 - July 4, 2025)
• Sun Bleeds Orange (June 4, 2025)
• Hy-Veo3 (Hysterealism) (May 30, 2025)
• Artificial Gentle Intelligence (AGI) (May 22, 2025)
• Carbon Emissions of #genAI in Context (May 5, 2025)
• StimVerse Draft (April 1 & 20–21, 2025)
• GHIR: Global Health Immune Response (Mar 7, 2025)
• Liferature: Writing Life with Protein Language Models (Mar 5, 2025)
• Matriarchal AI (Claude 3.7) (Feb 26, 2025)
• #wuai Whole-Use-AI (Ethical #genAI Constraint) (First implemented: Spring, 2024)
• Everyone at Home Everywhere (A one-year durational performance) (Dec 31, 2024-2025)
• Messages to Humanity (Oct 31 – Nov 30, 2024)
• AI-Artist (Aug 17–28, 2024)
• AI-Morphs with McKenna (Aug 13–16, 2024)
• Artificial Immediacy / PAVS (June–July, 2024)
• Suno Feeding Suno (June 14–23, 2024)
• Hallucinations are (almost) all you Need (Feb–May, 2024)
• The Way Life Is + Rainbow-Goat-Kittens (June 14–23, 2024)
• Suno v3 & Haiper Tests (Mar, 2024)
• Identity Upgrade Series (Oct 7 – Nov 12, 2023)
• 
  "Xtending Digital Narrative" [weekly Substack of AI links] (Aug, 2023 - July,2025)