Visual artist Darren Johnston is using generative ai to blur the virtual and real

Having started his career as a dancer and choreographer, Darren Johnston’s creative journey has been one of constant experimentation and intuition – one that’s seen him join the dots between design, dance, architecture and electronic music. Here he reflects on how generative AI is informing his next leap forward.

I found an article about my work online that referred to me as transdisciplinary, which I found interesting. My background is as a choreographer and director, from performing arts through into visual arts, and now I’m also working within architecture. My practice merges lots of different disciplines.

I grew up in the UK, and spent a lot of time, when I was very young, at underground techno events in London: dark basements and heavy bass. Lots of my friends became music producers and DJs, but I was always drawn to the visual or immersive side of that experience – especially the dancing. That led me to study contemporary dance. Initially I was interested in becoming a dancer, but I seemed to have a natural affiliation for choreography. I started out by making work that I thought I would enjoy watching.

My background in electronic music meant there was this through line – even when I studied dance, my whole aesthetic was connected to that world. For me it was always about that crossover between contemporary dance and club culture, and through that trajectory I achieved a fair amount of success quite early on as a choreographer. I won international awards and acclaim, and showed my work at venues like the Southbank Centre, the Roundhouse, and the Barbican. My focus was always on collaboration with different disciplines in that space. In my career, I’ve been lucky enough to work with artists like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Tim Hecker and Laurel Halo.

I studied at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, where I learned about movement and choreography, as well as video projection, lighting, sonography and stage design. From here I started exploring what you’d probably call concert or event design – with a particular focus on digital environments and projection mapping. That led me to architecture, and a stint living in Berlin where I had a loose residency at the techno club Berghain, working with the lighting designers on projection mapping the architecture. People talk a lot about immersive installations, and I think a techno club – especially Berghain – is probably the most immersive experience you can have. It was during my time at Berghain that I fell in love with dance again.

Since then, things have come full circle and I’ve started bringing performance back into my projects. In a way, I’ve reframed my practice as a choreographer to be more like a visual artist who uses the body in installations and lighting designs. I’m now an artist in residence at Zaha Hadid Architects in London. I’ve been working with them since 2020. My work there started out by looking at virtual worlds. This was during lockdown when nobody knew if the world was ever going to open up again. I went on a deep dive into VR for about two years, and then, when the world did start opening up, the question became: how do we translate this virtual work into something real? The body of work we’re creating is called Portal, and has lots of sub-projects within it, many of them built on this blurring between virtual and real.

There's always been a very strong digital and futuristic aesthetic to my work, so I was quite inspired by AI anyway, almost as a sci-fi concept. And I’ve always used different tools to sketch my work. So for me, the move into using AI was a natural process. I’ve never been massively into the idea of really intense coding to make digital art – I find using prompts much more creative. And what I’ve found with exactly.ai is that now the models have learned a little bit about my aesthetic, I can model new ideas, but they will also take me into directions that are slightly different to what I'd anticipated. It’s like having a new collaborator.

For me, it’s been really useful for modelling new concepts. I can come up with modelled ideas and then look at them with my team and start to think about how we could actually make them physically real. What interested me about exactly.ai was that I’ve dabbled with other AI tools, but found it really hard to get them to create work that looks like mine. My work is very minimal: shards of light in haze, bodies under very little light, a lot of dark spaces. Essentially what I wanted was a slight variation on that universe, and to be honest I had relatively low expectations. But there’s one image in particular, that I generated using exactly.ai based on a series of my light installations, that blew me away. It gave me a really beautiful, minimal light design that’s going to inform the design I use in my new project.

That image (above) creates a scenario where a beam of light comes down on the stage, but then there are these outlines of light on the floor which aren't caused by the beam of light – but they look beautiful! So based on that, I have to sit and think: how would we create that light on the floor without the beams? It got us into really interesting questions about hidden LEDs, among other things. Now we've come up with this concept for a stage design based on solving a question the AI gave us. First of all, that’s a really cool process. And to be honest, it’s a design that I never would have come up with consciously. It’s like the AI tricks the mind, or takes you out of your habits.

The first iteration of the Portal project is going to be a collaboration with Japan and other international partners, then it’s going to be at Sadler's Wells. We’re doing a period of research over the autumn, and we will have a residency there in January. That will be probably the first time the audience will get to see any of this.

I understand why some people are wary of AI, but I’m over the whole dystopian nightmare thing. I just see it constructively. There are questions around ownership, but that’s also what I like about the exactly.ai platform. I’m putting my work into it and they’re my prompts, so for me that’s still my work because it’s coming from an organic source. I was talking to someone recently, and reflecting on how terrified people were of the Internet in 1996 / 97. Just like then, AI is very new. But really it's like having a collaborator on your laptop – and one that hugely speeds up workflow. I think creatively, if people open up to it, there's a lot of potential for doing things we couldn't have done before.