David Jhave Johnston is a Canadian poet, videographer, and motion graphics artist working chiefly in digital and computational media,.
The jury stated that Jhave "argues persuasively that it is in the convergence of literature and computation that language truly comes alive, proliferates, "rolls over" and wriggles through data space.
[13] In a review of the book for Textual Practice, Maisie Ridgeway notes that Johnston's animism is different too, but inclusive of other object-oriented philosophies such as Jane Bennett's vital materialism.
[14] The animism of digital literature is, Ridgeway writes, "reconfigured as a solution that returns language to the body, healing the divide between heart and head".
[15] Heckman describes Aesthetic Animism as a book that "sits at the intersection of the venerable, deliberate craft of poetry and the “unprofessional” approach of the tinkerer", at times reading like an encyclopaedia and at others like "a series of prompts that beg further exploration, a speculative explosion of articles that could be".