Mika Johnson is a multimedia artist born in San Diego, California, who graduated at Oberlin College in 2000. His first works are mainly fiction films and documentaries, including examples of Performative Documentary as we can see in the web series The Amerikans.
Working with a wide range of different media, in 2018 he directed an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis into VR in his first XR project, VRwandlung. This project granted him international success, being feautured in The Economist and travelling to over 50 cities worldwide.
His debut feature Confessions of a Box Man (2020), the first part of a trilogy, blends fiction film and documentary techniques. The film won Best Director at the Eastern Nigeria International Film Festival as well as the Best Film Award at the 11th Cinema Open film festival in Hradec Králové, in the Czech Republic.
Johnson is currently touring with The Infinite Library, a virtual reality travelling installation produced by Goethe Institut which reimagines future libraries as interactive spaces able to engage visitors through multisensory ways of storytelling. It consists of a QR code game, 3D-printed models, audiovisual works, holograms and a vast VR library set in a cave.
In 2021 released and toured with The Republic of Dreams, a multimedia travelling installation based on the work of Polish author Bruno Schultz which imagines a hypothetical republic using videos, illustrations, an interactive map, sonic experiences, and more. Here, real life and dreams overlap, as it often occurs in Johnson’s projects. Indeed, his narratives usually concern the subtle border between the oniric and the real, involving mythos and rituals which engage the visitor through all their senses.
