Keiken's members Tanya Cruz, Hana Omori and Isabel Ramos, whose average age is less than thirty, spannacle their work spans multiple fields: new media art installations, game engines, CGI animation, virtual reality and augmented reality. In their view, technology is merely a means of realizing ideas.
Since its inception in 2015, Keiken has quickly gained a lot of attention, and his works have been collected and exhibited by major art institutions and festivals in Europe and the United Kingdom, including the 2020 Venice Architecture Biennale, the 2020 Berlin Transmediale Festival, the 2019 London Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Image Behaviour Art Exhibition, the Utrecht IMPAKT Festival in the Netherlands, the MIRA New Media Festival in Barcelona, and so on. He recently won the 2021 CHANEL Next Prize (Chanel's award for artists around the world who are redefining their fields).
"We are architects of time and space"
In today's gradual conceptualization of contemporary art, art is not only limited to aesthetics, but more importantly, the meaning of the work.
Keiken's strength lies in their sharp observation and imagination of the current society and the future, and they are good at using artistic aesthetics and technical means to visualize these ideas.
Keiken means experience in Japanese.
The original intention of this group is to explore human consciousness and experience, especially in today's world where the boundaries between virtual and reality are increasingly blurred, how should human subjective consciousness and objective reality be self-consistent? "We are architects of time and space", Keiken's works use the immersive experience of virtual and real, digital and physical space as a medium to explain their own perception of the world, inspiring the audience to construct an inner world that belongs to the self, independent, dialectical, and critical thinking, to resist the ubiquitous political narrative, capital monopoly and technological hegemony of the manipulation of individual consciousness.
What gives the members of Keiken such a sense of mission?
With this in mind, I interviewed two of the London-based female artists, Hana Omori and Isabel Ramos, who agreed to meet at a café in Bethnal Green, East London, and although they arrived on time despite catching the once-in-thirty-year storm in The Uk, Eunice.
Hana is of mixed English and Japanese descent, and part of her long hair at the back of her head is pinned with two chopsticks. Isabel is a mixture of British, Spanish, and European Jews with a delicate and three-dimensional face. Tanya, a descendant of British and Mexicans, was unable to participate in the interview because she was based in Berlin, but the trio's ten-year friendship and common career ambitions have made them inseparable from each other, and perhaps the metaphor of plants can be used as a metaphor for their tacit cooperation: Hana is a seed, always with new ideas; Tanya is a rhizome, nourishing and nurturing these inspirations; Isabel is a flower, presenting inspiration and ideas in the best way.
What if there is disagreement? Isabel laughs and says, "We sometimes argue, but this kind of argument is a process of getting to know, integrating, and inspiring each other, which greatly promotes our creation." "The daily routine of the three people is: every day from 9 am to 8 pm. Isabel admits that sometimes work is stressful, but fortunately three people care for and motivate each other, and this feeling of "you are not alone" is their most important "superpower".
Hana and Tanya grew up in Cornwall and Isabel grew up in Oxfordshire. Most of the country towns in the UK are beautifully landscaped, and the natural and pristine ecology is well protected. Hana told me: "When I was a child, my home was remote and sparsely populated, and the most contact was nature, and I was very sensitive to the changing laws of the seasons. Because I deeply experienced the joy of connecting with nature, as a child, I was overwhelmed by the city and the capitalism that the city symbolized. ”
Isabel believes that another important reason for connecting them is their similar ethnically integrated backgrounds, and identity is a topic that can never be avoided for people born with a multicultural approach. Both mentioned that the different cultural backgrounds represented by their parents often made them feel like they were experiencing different realities, but this "experiencing different realities" naturally led them to develop a habit of thinking dialectically about problems. Thinking about a seemingly contradictory problem from both positive and negative perspectives allows them to broaden their thinking and rationally look at an increasingly diverse and complex world.
Technology is just a means
Thought and technology are two important dimensions of the extension of contemporary art, ideas determine the concept and meaning of art, and technology determines the boundaries of what works can achieve, so Keiken attaches great importance to continuous learning in these two fields.
For the former, because the Humanistic Arts education in the United Kingdom attaches great importance to cultivating personal critical thinking, and this rational speculative ability is based on the premise of free will and humanistic spirit, with extensive reading as the means, and with deep thinking. Keiken's reading and critical thinking skills can be clearly seen in their work and interviews.
When it comes to technology, Keiken spends a lot of time and effort on his own. The 2019 work "Feel my metaverse" stemmed from their self-taught CGI animation and other related software tools. They joke that they have delved into CGI traumatic sequelae. Asked why she delved into these technologies, Hana said, "You need to understand where the boundaries of technology are in order to be free to conceive." Digital art is like creating on a virtual canvas, and I feel a kind of freedom that I have never felt before. ”
Still, technology sees it as a mere means of realizing ideas, and they are cautious about the impact of technology itself on people. "We believe that technology dominates the future, but without philosophical speculation and humanistic spiritual guidance, allowing those interest-driven tech giants to manipulate our world, even if technology is very advanced, it will be a nihilistic and mutilated existence," Hana said. ”
In Keiken's work, we experience a surreal, futuristic apocalyptic atmosphere. Their latest work, Wisdoms for Love 3.0, is a game-like setting that requires audience interaction, depicting a barren future world in which both men, women and children have a transparent glass womb, known as the Inner land, symbolizing human ethics, beliefs, and values. This is a tribute to the American science fiction novelist and feminist scholar Ursula Le Guin's theory of the "container", which believes that the ethical beliefs contained in the container are the most primitive tools of human beings, providing energy inward before playing an outward role.
The highlight of the work is a humanoid figure like Elon Musk, holding three cards in his hand, each with a goal: owning future, owning planet, owning internal land; next to a young girl, with a line engraved on the back of her body: biological knowledge x computer control x big data = biological knowledge × Computing power × data = the ability to hack humans), a line that quotes a famous Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Harari, and is the message Keiken wants to convey in this work: beware of the manipulation of personal consciousness by technology. Those original ethical beliefs of humanity are cards in your hand, and once you abandon them and allow technology to manipulate and invade, you will lose control of your inner world.
American neuroscientist, psychologist and philosopher Antonio Damasio believes that "we are not thinking machines with the ability to feel, but sensory machines with the ability to think", which means that humans are essentially a perceptual animal, and feelings drive thinking.
In Keiken's project Feel My Metaverse with dance artist Sakeema Crook, Keiken designed a metaverse scene in which Sakeema dances freely on stage, with her Avatar on the big screen, which captures her movements through a tracker and dances in sync with the real-life Sakeema. Enjoying Sakeema's dance, the audience will naturally pay attention to the rhythm of their own body. Hana believes that contemporary people are overly addicted to mobile phones and computers, and this addiction will lead to the gradual loss of consciousness and physical feelings, and this loss will blunt our self-perception in reality and empathy for other people's feelings, and then blunt the ability to think.
When it comes to collaborations with other artists, such as CGI artist Ryan Vautier, Keiken sees these collaborations as an organic, fluid, and mutually inspiring process. Ryan helped Keiken expand the boundaries of technological fulfillment, inspiring them to use technology to break through physical boundaries and express the concept and meaning of art.
Keiken, one of the winners of the 2021 CHANEL Next Prize, will also be attending the Venice Biennale. I asked them what they would talk to the other winners, and Isabel smiled and said, "I haven't thought about it yet, but I'll be curious about some of their experiences in their field." Everyone is surrounded by a different reality, and we are curious about the reality of others and want to understand the world from multiple perspectives. I took her words: "To strengthen dialectical thinking." Everyone laughed in acquiescence.
In the age of globalization and the Internet, extensive reading and deep thinking can build a stronger and more stable inner world to counter the complexity of this world.
Author: Anna
Editors: Zhang Jing Mia Zhang, Zhu Fan Juvan Zhu
Photo courtesy of Keiken
Fine Arts: Roland