David Jhave Johnston

David Jhave Johnston is a Canadian poet, videographer, and motion graphics artist working chiefly in digital and computational media. Jhave completed his PhD at Concordia University in 2011, and taught between 2014 and 2017 at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, after which he returned to Montreal.

This artist's work is often attributed, simply, to the name Jhave. In 2019 the arts press Anteism released Jhave's print-published version of a major work exploring machine learning and computational poetics, ReRites. There are twelve volumes of poetry in this work, one for each month during which the project was undertaken. A thirteenth volume is published with the set, containing critical responses to the project from significant commentators including: Allison Parrish, Johanna Drucker, Kyle Booten, Stephanie Strickland, John Cayley, Lai-Tze Fan, Nick Montfort, Mairéad Byrne, and Chris Funkhouser. ReRites crystalized out of Jhave's initial work generating poetry from selected corpora with tools such as TensorFlow, Keras, and PyTorch. This was Jhave's BDP (Big Data Poetry) project, noted and discussed along with the development of what was to be ReRites in Scott Rettberg's Electronic Literature.

Jhave is also a theorist of poetics in digital media. In Aesthetic Animism he argues that the dynamic and interactive properties which digital media may afford to linguistic artefacts gives evidence of the animism, the life that, according to some, invests all things. Aesthetic Animism was given an illuminating review by Davin Heckman for rhizomes, and Scott Rettberg also cites the book, summarizing certain of its ideas and explaining Jhave's concept of TAVIT 'Text-Audio-Visual Interactivity'.

Jhave has also produced a number of videos documenting interviews with prominent practitioners and theorists of poetry and poetics in new media.

• ReRites: Human + A.I. poetry. 2017–2019.CS1 maint: date format (link) Details of print publication in references.
• McLu-uhms (2012). Reviewed by Leonardo Flores.
• Zero whack. 2010.
• NomadLingo. 1999–2000.CS1 maint: date format (link)

• Aesthetic Animism (2016)