Ryuta Aoki is an artistic director and social sculptor based in Tokyo. With the theme of exploring "societies as they could be," he orchestrates research and development, art projects, conferences, and exhibitions, and creates works of art as artist collectives, in the interdisciplinary field between art, science, and technology. Grounded in Japanese culture and philosophy deeply connected to nature, he also embraces the new perspectives on life and humanity brought about by advances in science and technology. Beyond mere exhibitions, he creates works that directly interact with and instigate change in nature and society as systems.
Ryuta Aoki
Last update : 17 Jul. 2024
Works
Hiroya Tanaka Lab + METACITY
Bio Sculpture, 2021
Media Installation
Bio Sculpture is an art project by Keio University SFC Tanaka Hiroya Laboratory and METACITY, themed around the exploration of "Technology for Multi-species" in the era of fire known as "Pyrocene.”
The aim of this project is to reshape the relationship between humans and nature by opening up the technologies and social systems developed by humans to the natural world, in order to restore and nurture ecosystems. The project is strongly influenced by the 2019 Australian wildfires, which are said to have claimed over a billion lives.
The TEA-ROOM
SOTOROJI #1, 2021
Media Installation
Tea practitioners have long admired the subtle and profound world depicted in ink paintings, expressing this worldview in tea rooms and tea gatherings. Tea rooms, including their gardens, are designed to gradually lead visitors into this mysterious world. The space from the entrance of the garden, called the roji gate, to the middle gate separating the secular and mystical worlds is known as a sotoroji, meaning a outer garden in English. Guests participating in a tea gathering cleanse themselves of worldly dust in this sotoroji, immersing themselves in the profound world and indulging in a higher level of play.
The art collective "The TEA-ROOM" expresses the material and spiritual aspects of the tea ceremony world from a contemporary perspective and with contemporary methods. This work is one of the SOTOROJI series that creates a contemporary sotoroji using QR codes, which have been generalized as a means to efficiently connect the physical and informational worlds.
METACITY
New Rousseau Machine, 2021
Media Installation
This artwork visualizes the "Schrodinger's cat" phenomenon of popular will, in which changing the aggregation rules can simultaneously create different worldlines (outcomes) even if the voting content remains the same. It questions what popular will is and the importance of technologies used in collective decision-making. The next-generation governance system, "New Rousseau Machine" (NRM), is utilized to conduct a voting experiment and visualize its results.