grace grace grace

[fka garrett laroy johnson]
b. 1989
sound + media artist, educator, theorist

artist statement

I am a queer installation and performance artist working with real-time sonic, visual, and haptic digital and analog computational media. My work deals with themes of countercultural collectivity, more-than-human perception, and queer spirituality through the lens of non-linear chaotic systems and process-oriented philosophy.

My creative practice with technology spans many genres, including large-scale sculptural installation, live electronics performance, interactive dance, multichannel sound sculpture, and analog/digital instrument design. I consider these works of experiential media art (sound, projection/video, light), skewing experience over immersion and encounter over spectacle to take us out of what we thought we knew about the world and into the present unfolding of reality.

I create art foregrounding processes that challenge reactionary habits of thought and create new potentials for feeling, thinking, and acting with the non-human world. Working almost exclusively with live and real-time processing, I develop my own hardware and software because it allows for audiences to experience unfamiliar blocks of time and texture that cut across human gesturality and nonhuman rhythmicity and expressivity. These encounters aim to feed communities’ cache of experience which encourage new ways of framing our moment and relating to each other.

teaching and organizing

I teach media theory-philosophy seminars as well as studio courses in the Art Technology / Sound Practices department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and in the new media area at the University of Illinois Chicago.

In 2023, I co-founded CCAM, the Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines.

short performer bio

Grace grace grace (performing as hypergrace) is an artist working at the busy intersection of process philosophy, computational media systems, and cybernetics. He leverages training in cello performance to create generative sound and media installations and performances luring encounters with perception, thinking, and feeling.

Grace writes and assembles software and hardware systems with indeterminate logics aiming to create play in the unforeseeable unpredictabilities of the aesthetic event.