ArchiveExhibition
Keiken: Player of Cosmic ༄ؘ ° Realms
14 Jan-27 Mar 2022
Aspex Portsmouth
Portsmouth PO1 3BF
Keiken Keiken, Dream Time Life Simulation. Credit: ©Keiken
Overview
Artist collective Keiken invite you into their interactive installation, Player of Cosmic ༄ؘ ° Realms at Aspex Portsmouth.
The exhibition contemplates the future of gaming environments and human relationships through CGI (computer generated imagery) film and hands-on experiences.
Keiken, taking their name from the Japanese word for experience, are a collective of artists from mixed diasporic backgrounds (Mexican/Japanese/European/Jewish) based in London and Berlin, who have been collaborating since 2015.
Their work traverses media including moving image, installation, gaming, performance and more recently NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), to test-drive alternative futures and reflect on how we currently live in the real and digital realms. Many of Keiken’s recent works are created inside a fictional Metaverse, an imagined world built with gaming software, where digital avatars explore extraordinary ‘natural’ and built environments, and contemplate their existence.
In Player of Cosmic ༄ؘ ° Realms Keiken present two works, The Life Game, an interactive CGI film series; and Bet(a) Bodies, a wearable technology designed to stimulate empathy and a physical simulation of the experience of pregnancy.
Keiken’s exhibition follows on from an extended residency with Aspex at the beginning of 2020, during which they also ran a six week course in creating Augmented Reality filters.
To conclude their residency Keiken were commissioned by Aspex to produce a new digital artwork in collaboration with Ryan Vautier, titled We Are At The End Of Something. Set inside a CGI Metaport (subverted airport), the moving image episode re-imagined experiences of travel in a post Covid-19 world, asking questions about surveillance and capitalism. As with many of Keiken’s artworks the piece has since evolved and been presented as a fully immersive 360° projection in Barcelona, online with the Yerevan Biennale and also shown in Brazil and Berlin.