Aspex Portsmouth

Player of Cosmic ༄ؘ ° Realms, Keiken

Artist collective Keiken invite you into their interactive installation, Player of Cosmic ༄ؘ ° Realms.

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. Find out more about the Collective Futures course by watching this video on the PONToon exhibition website.

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.

Keiken in Conversation

Keiken will be in conversation with Vickie Fear, Curator/Programme Manager at Aspex on Wednesday 16 March, 6–7.30pm to discuss the development of their practice since their residency and the work in Player of Cosmic ༄ؘ ° Realms. Click here to find out more.