Member Spotlight: Jonah King

For our next NMC Member Spotlight JLS Gangwisch interviewed Jonah King, read or hear the conversation below!

JLS Gangwisch:
Would you tell us a little bit about yourself, where are you in the world and what are you doing these days?

Jonah King:
My name is Jonah King and I’m from Ireland originally. I moved to New York about nine years ago, almost on the day I think, and I came here to do a graduate program in visual art, and I stayed, fell in love with New York and I have been here ever since. 

I am working as a new media artist primarily. I’m also an educator, I’m an associate professor of Interactive Digital Media at the Stevens Institute. I work in a variety of mediums- sculpture, digital video, interactive and immersive technologies. I also make kind of large-scale network projects and pretty much anything that serves my inquiry, I suppose.

JLS Gangwisch:
Would you tell us what new media art means to you?

Jonah King:
I think for me new media is something that happened to me rather than something I joined in. I think “new media artist” is a beautifully unpin-downable category. It allows for a kind of a play and openness where I think most of the new media artists that I know, certainly, are united less by formal constraints and more by a kind of enthusiasm for the recently possible. There’s a kind of exploration that becomes central in new media, which I think is in every art practice, but the amount we have to learn and relearn technology in order to explore our ideas sets us in a slightly different category. 

JLS Gangwisch:
Are there any current or upcoming projects you’d like to tell us about?

Jonah King:
Sure, I’m working on two projects at the moment. One of them is called Honey Fungus, which is a virtual reality experience where you commune with a sci-fi omnipresent mycelial entity that encompasses the core of the earth, accruing the world’s erotic memories.
So, it’s this kind of and queer sentient unifier that you merge with and conduct through a virtual reality experience. So, I’m really excited about that. That should be premiering in the New York Mycological Film Festival on the 1st of October at the SVA Theater, and then hopefully we will tour it.  I’ve been working on it for about a year and a half, two years now. So a lot of my work is about that relationship with landscape and ecology.  I like to promote a kind of generalized agnosticism about everything, so I think if there’s a central theme to my work, it’s about dissolving the edges of what you call yourself, what you think of as your body and your identity and looking at how our relationship with landscape, ecology, nature, and concepts within the study of ecology completely undermines the a lot of the dominant cultural beliefs that maybe hold us back from new ways of living.

Another project which is worth talking about, is an ongoing project which is reaching another
It’s called All my Friends Are in the Cloud.  I started working on this in 2017, it’s essentially a series of sculptures of TV towers, a series of monitors, framed inside of a steel and pillar, and on the monitors are images of people embracing and disintegrating as they rise up the tower of monitors so that at the base there are photoreal and at the end of it, they’ve completely disintegrated into digital particles essentially.  

That project started by me inviting my friends to my studio and encouraging them to bring people they love, where I filmed them and 3D scanned them embracing and animated the embraces, the meshes, to form this effect.  I did that in 2017, I experienced some success with that project at the time and toured a little bit and went to a couple of museums and art fairs, things like that, and very quickly people were asking me if they could participate in it.  So just before the pandemic in 2019, I worked with the Illinois State University, and they have an arts technology lab there and we built a giant machine as part of an exhibition that people could stand inside, and a kind of 3D scanning process was built into the, we called it a harvesting gyr, this thing that looks a little bit like an airport scanner.  You stand inside it,
you embrace it, this thing spins around you, and your image is recorded, 3D scanned, and then automatically animated inside the pillar of monitors in the adjacent room.

I’ve been working with some people to try to develop this into a larger scale series of sculptures where it can tour and continue to accrue embraces into what becomes a sort of ever-expanding archive that can be streamed in real time at any location or monitor screen.  So those are the two big projects I’m working on at the moment and I’m really excited to see them grow.

JLS Gangwisch:
Where can people follow your work online? Do you have a website, Instagram?

Jonah King:
Yes, my website is, JonahKing.com and the Instagram is KingJonahking.

JLS Gangwisch:
Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about that we haven’t touched on in this interview?

Jonah King:

Well, not really, is there anything you think I left out or anything worth talking about more?

JLS Gangwisch:
I’m curious a little bit about your evolution as an artist. 

Jonah King:
I think for me, my first love was art house film. I am an only child and my mom had to work a lot when I was growing up and I grew up beside an independent video shop in a village outside of Dublin, which was a rare and strange anomaly for Dublin in the I guess early 90s, mid-90s and so by the time I was about 10 years old, I’d watched, you know all of Tarkovsky and Jan Svankmajer and all that kind of good stuff.  I really loved it, I think I found a kind of solace in that kind of craft and imagery.  I was particularly turned on by filmmakers who worked ultra-independently, people like Maya Deren and Jan Svankmajer, more artists making films than filmmakers who made arty films.  So that was the model that I was really encouraged to follow, so I chose art school over film school.  I think because in film there’s an emphasis on narrative that I’m less excited by.  I’m more excited by the affect of being entranced by moving image and the certain sensations or spaces that can be conveyed by these kinds of subtle moods and tones that you can experience with moving image and that kind of media.

So, I see my work as an exploration of a kind of departure from a filmmaking practice.  When I was in my late teens, early 20s, I was very involved in what was then called the anti-globalization, but I suppose you’d now call it the ultra-globalization movement, which was a kind of dissent against, I suppose, a particular brand of capitalism and hierarchical power structures.  There was a lot of protesting and direct action, so that really encouraged me to have a very socially led practice.  For a good number of years, I was running an art center
and doing socially engaged practice primarily.

 I think something like All My Friends Are in the Cloud is a good example of hybridizing those experiences with a digital media practice, because it’s really about a participation, it’s about the community, the work is generated by the viewers to some degree, and so that has always 

been a really important of my work.

As time has gone on, I’m really excited about things like immersive technologies where we’re able to do really fascinating things to perception and consciousness, like how quickly your body or you will adapt to perceiving yourself in a different body I think it begins to ask really fun questions about what is a self, how do we identify with the bodies we’re born into, and how mutable is that?  Those are questions that I have about reality, about being a person, so that feeds into my art practice. 

I also think just on the side, I was very influenced by archaeology growing up.  Ireland is a place that has a very frought relationship with its landscape, many layers of colonialism, kind of ongoing conflict about rights to territory.  So that sort of relationship of place and how the environment around us dictates our sense of our own histories and our politics is a major theme in all of my work.
JLS Gangwisch:
Thank you so much for talking with us today.