CARTER JOHNSON is a visual artist and educator based in New York City. His work examines the fraught intersection of the digital and the material, exploring how the data that constitutes modern identity can become a site of both personal expression and external control.

His interdisciplinary practice, which encompasses digital artifacts, as well as handmade artists’ books, linocut printing, sculpture, graffiti, and other painting, currently leverages narrative tropes from science fiction. A central, ongoing project is the fictional biography of a sentient AI born from his personal digital footprint. This allegory provides a framework to materialize questions of agency, authenticity, and the violence inherent in data capitalism.

This focus is deeply informed by his background. His academic journey —spanning a BA in English Literature, a Masters in Architecture from MIT, and culminating in a BA and MFA in Art from Hunter College — forged a unique perspective concerned with systems, language, and structure. This path is mirrored in his pedagogical practice; he teaches both digital fabrication (creative coding, physical computing) and foundational drawing, consistently probing the gap between technological precision and material contingency. His identity as a gay, HIV+ man from The South further grounds this exploration in the political reality of the body as a documented, regulated, and often contested site.

Carter Johnson’s work ultimately questions where the self resides amidst the myriad layers of physical being, digital representation, and political control.