Blake Johnston
Senior Lecturer, Te Rewa o Puanga School of Music and Creative Media Production
Blake Johnston is a sound artist, technologist, academic, and composer from Aotearoa, New Zealand. His practice sits at the intersection of experience design and emerging forms of technology, synthesising these fields to explore the perception of the audience. His work adopts new forms of technology to create environments and experiences across multiple disciplines including live performance, kinetic sculpture, musical mechatronics, wearable technology, and installation art.
Blake’s research explores a new approach to sound art, coined metaperceptual, which seeks to create extraordinary experiences and environments that invite the audience to explore their own perception. The audience’s unique subjectivity is the core focus, with the audience’s presence and perspective co-creating the artworks with the curated environment. The metaperceptual approach affords a method of creating deeply introspective experiences; interactive in a way that gives the audience control over their navigation of the artwork, gallery environment, and their own senses. To produce these new forms of creating metaperceptual experiences, much of his research focuses on sound art practices and generating new experiential systems.
He is an active educator, teaching in a range of fields including composition, interface and interaction, human computer interaction, music technology, software development, hardware development, and mechatronics.
His works have been exhibited locally and internationally including in Singapore, Chile, Thailand, Australia, Colombia, United Kingdom, Hong Kong, United States of America, and Greece. Locally, he has performed and/or exhibited at the Adam Art Gallery, Bowen House Gallery, Toi Poneke Arts Centre, and Wellington City Gallery.