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Note: The caption for the Vimeo link below is included here as the Video Caption. Please include it beneath the embedded Vimeo link on the page. Please place the video above all of the images. The video is intended to be seen first. Thank you. Video Caption: Autumn Illumination, from the Lucid Voxelations series. Time-based media. Duration: 2:20. 2025. Music: “Embrace” by Evgeny Bardyuzha, licensed via Pixabay. Image Captions:
This artwork belongs to my Lucid Voxelations series, which approaches time as a lived dimension that can be shaped and encountered through spatial form. Using computational processes, I transform recorded moments into structures that retain traces of perception, attention, and memory.
The work draws from footage recorded while driving through autumn trees in the Adirondacks. At selected moments, I identify sky apertures—bounded regions of visible sky defined by the surrounding trees and landscape—and transform them across time into three-dimensional structures.
Created through video, 3D computer graphics, and 3D printing, the work treats selection as an interpretive act rather than a neutral extraction of data. Viewers are invited to consider how a fleeting experience of landscape has been transformed into a tangible record of attention and lived time.
The artwork begins with video I recorded while traveling through the Adirondacks. At selected frames, I manually trace apertures of visible sky bounded by trees and landscape. I sample a color from the image along each aperture’s edge and use it to fill the region in that frame. The traced shape and sampled color become source material for the three-dimensional construction.
I import the shapes into a 3D graphics environment and position them along a temporal axis according to their locations in the video sequence. I either extrude the shapes across selected durations or connect them between different moments to create three-dimensional structures. These structures retain relationships of sequence, timing, shape, and color from the original footage. The frame selection, tracing, color sampling, and geometric construction are artist-directed rather than produced through automated segmentation or machine learning.
The process produces a rendered animation, a three-dimensional digital model, and a mesh that can be fabricated through 3D printing.
Ed S. Johnston is a computational artist and designer exploring time, perception, and lived experience through video, 3D computer graphics, and digital fabrication. His work has been exhibited internationally in the Lumen Prize’s touring exhibition and at ACM SIGGRAPH, CVPR, ISEA, and the Generative Art Conference. His broader creative practice has received a New York Emmy Award nomination and a Viddy Platinum Award. His current practice develops Voxelism, a method that transforms selected regions from video sequences into three-dimensional forms and animations. Johnston is an Associate Professor at Kean University’s Michael Graves College in New Jersey, USA.
