Johanna Flato

Johanna Flato is a visual artist and creative technologist from San Antonio, TX, now based in Brooklyn, NY. She investigates ways in which our sense of site—and in turn, locational belonging — is mediated and manipulated through language, technology, and gesture.

She is the founder and developer of an augmented reality app called Tangle—a mobile tool for spatial annotation and poetic encounters. Tangle makes site-based, real-time, mixed-reality ideation and collaboration possible. It aims to inject critical friction into this accelerationalist AI/XR moment and seed our tech-mediated environments with a more civic, intentional, and playful dimension.

As an ongoing research thread, Johanna coined and iteratively re-works the notion of a “syn-site” (a term updating Robert Smithson’s site/non-site construct for our contemporary extended realities).