ezra johnston

> critical new media artist _

> now showing — _

Ezra Johnston is a neat little freak. He would love to work with you.

He is a Critical New Media Artist and Systems Designer studying Digital Media Design at RMIT University in Melbourne. His practice is centred on reclaiming technology. He is fascinated by how digital architecture shapes culture, identity, and connection. He can do anything on the computer, and is alright in real life as well. He has fear in his heart.

If you'd like to get in touch, send an email to ezraijohns@gmail.com.

2026

> Post History_

What will the internet look like after we're gone?

> visit_

Post History

Post History asks what the internet looks like when no one is tending it anymore. Built as a web installation mimicking the decayed aesthetics of abandoned digital spaces, the piece forced me to work with intentional brokenness as a design system rather than a failure state. The hardest part was making something look genuinely neglected without it just looking unfinished.

> visit the site_

2025

> Cholerics_

A surreal narrative game concept built from medieval humours and modern dread.

> visit_

Cholerics

Cholerics is a narrative game concept built around medieval humour theory — the idea that personality is determined by four bodily fluids. Translating a 12th-century medical framework into contemporary UI/UX logic was the core design challenge. The PSX-era visual treatment came from wanting the game to feel physically unstable, like the humours themselves.

> visit the site_

> Twitter 2_

Elon Musk's revolutionary new incremental social media platform.

> visit_

Twitter 2

Twitter 2 is a satirical incremental game that lets you watch engagement addiction play out in slow motion. Building it meant temporarily internalising the logic I was critiquing — every dark pattern I implemented had to actually work. The piece performs its own thesis: you can't design a trap without understanding how it closes.

> visit the site_

> My New Dance_

Three years of shooting projects I never completed, collapsed into one.

> watch_

My New Dance

Three years of footage from projects that never came together, assembled into something that admits it. The edit was constrained by the rule that nothing could be repurposed out of context — every shot was filmed for something else. The piece lives in the gap between intention and completion, and asks whether that gap is worth looking at.

> watch on youtube_

2024

> Working on Thinking_

A GIF series exploring glitch as methodology, not accident.

> view_

Working on Thinking

A GIF series treating glitch as methodology rather than accident. The technical constraint was working purely in frame-based compositing — no keyframes, no easing. Each loop refuses to resolve. The intention was to make digital error feel deliberate and slow, to ask whether breakdown can be a creative system.

> view the piece_

> Incrementelligence_

An incremental game about the rise of surveillance capitalism.

> play_

Incrementelligence

An idle clicker about surveillance capitalism — deliberately the most passive game genre for an active critique. Building the upgrade trees taught me more about the psychology of data extraction than any essay I had read. The satire only works if the mechanics are genuinely compulsive, so I had to make the thing I was critiquing actually function.

> play on itch.io_

> Framework_

A video collage about the extraordinary in the ordinary.

> watch_

Framework

A documentary collage responding to "the extraordinary in the ordinary", filmed and edited across three weeks mostly alone. The challenge was directorial: convincing strangers to let me film them doing nothing in particular, and making that feel significant in the edit. I led a team of four and directed the majority of the piece.

> watch on youtube_