Keiken x Ryan Vautier

Keiken are a collaborative practice, co-founded by artists Tanya Cruz, Hana Omori and Isabel Ramos in 2015, who frequently work with multiple collaborators. Based between London and Berlin, they come from mixed diasporic backgrounds (Mexican/Japanese/European/Jewish).

Named after the Japanese word for experience, they create speculative worlds, using moving-image, CGI, gaming software, installation, virtual and augmented reality, programming and performance to merge the physical and digital. Their work simulates new structures and ways of existing, exploring how societal introjection governs the way we feel, think and perceive.

Recent projects and exhibitions include: We are at the end of something, MIRA.mov at IDEAL, Barcelona; UNHAMINITY, 3hd 2020 at HAU Hebbel am Ufer; Feel My Metaverse, transmediale 2020 End to End at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; How to Make a Paradise, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt; Augmented Empathy, FACT, Liverpool; The Time Complex, Yerevan Biennial, Online; Ghosts & Apparitions, Site Gallery with Sheffield Doc Fest, Sheffield (2020); Image Behaviour, ICA; and Jerwood Collaborate!, Jerwood Space, London (2019). Employing face-filter technologies Keiken have expanded their practice to include direct performative engagements with a diverse and global community.

Ryan Vautier is a CGI artist and designer based in London, who specialises in creating animated worlds that explore the fractures between the digital and physical. His work seeks to explore the evolution of digital realms and the influence of physical existence on these frontier spaces.

Recent projects have included the creation of Digital Spa for Dazed Beauty Wellness Week; the music video for Rhumba Club’s track Pocket Machine; and the Tate Modern’s Future Late programme. He has worked with Jon Emmony, The 1975, Ms Banks, Grimes, Ben Ditto and Lucy Hardcastle.

Recently with Keiken he has been a resident at Aspex Gallery in Portsmouths; was a collaborative partner in the creation of Metaverse: We are at the end of something, a 5-channel immersive CGI film which was exhibited at MIRA.mox at IDEAL, Barcelona; and worked on Augmented Empathy at FACT Liverpool.