Ryuta Aoki is a Japanese artist, artistic director, conceptual designer, system architect, software engineer, entrepreneur, and social sculptor based in Tokyo.
He explores “societies as they could be through an installation-centred practice at the intersection of art, science, and technology. From concept design to the process architecture for artistic research and development, he steers projects through to exhibitions and conferences where knowledge and aesthetics converge. Grounded in a Japanese view of nature embodied by chanoyu, the tea ceremony, his work absorbs emerging techno-scientific perspectives on life and humanity, seeking forms of practice that intervene directly in ecological and social realities beyond the gallery.
Selected exhibitions include the Kitakyushu Future Creation Art Festival (Japan, 2020); the Chiba City Festival of Arts (Japan, 2021); “2121 Futures In-Sight at 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT (Japan, 2021); “Trusting the Unseen (Thailand, 2023); and “AIHumanMultiverse (Korea, 2023).
In 2024, Aoki became the inaugural artist recipient of the Ethereum Foundations Artist Scholarship and, in the same year, the first Japanese participant in the residency programme at the Asia Culture Center (ACC) in Gwangju. The following year he joined the first cohort of the Agency for Cultural Affairs Art & Tech Creators Global Network, a fellowship programme aimed at enhancing the international presence of Japanese media art.
His honours include the Public Prize at the WIRED Creative Hack Award 2021 and the Social Impact Prize (Minister of Education Award) at the 25th Japan Media Arts Festival 2022—the first time the distinction was awarded to a Japanese team.
Ryuta Aoki
Last update : 07 May. 2025
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.