Ryuta Aoki is a Tokyo-based Japanese artist and independent curator working at the intersection of art and science and technology. Alongside producing artworks, he engages in artistic research and development in collaboration with research institutes, as well as the planning, design, and direction of exhibitions, collaborative production processes, and various programs that connect art, science, technology, and society.
His practice aims to render visible the “invisible structures”—such as mechanisms of fiction, cognitive and semiotic systems, algorithms, institutions, and ecological processes—and to enable critical intervention, thereby delineating the contours of “societies as they could be.”
His major exhibitions include MUTEK.jp 2019, Kitakyushu Future Creation Art Festival, 2121 Futures In-Sight at 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT, Chiba Art Festival, and DESIGNART 2024. Awards include the Public Prize at the WIRED Creative Hack Award (2021) and the Social Impact Award (Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Prize)—the first awarded to a Japanese group—at the 25th Japan Media Arts Festival, Art Division (2022). In 2024 he was selected for the Ethereum Foundation’s first-ever artist scholarship and the artist-in-residence program at the Asia Culture Center (ACC) in Gwangju, Korea. In 2025 he was named among the inaugural fellows of WAN: Art & Tech Creators Global Network, a talent development program established by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Japan.
Aoki has also served as Creative Producer for the Agency for Cultural Affairs project Japan Media Arts Distributed Museum (2020) and as Artistic Director of the exhibition Jack into the Noösphere at Chiba City’s first art festival (2021). In 2022 he contributed to the conceptual design of the international exhibition succeeding the Japan Media Arts Festival, working on frameworks and ecosystems for new value creation where media art and pop culture intersect.
Artist Statement
My practice takes as its starting point Joseph Beuys’s concept of social sculpture. I seek to extend this notion by intersecting it with speculative imagination and contemporary technologies, developing experiments that provisionally bring into being “societies as they could be.”
Born in Tokyo and having moved frequently during my childhood, I became aware of the distinctive atmospheres and tacit norms that subtly guided people’s behavior in each community. I realized that invisible structures exist—forces that determine people’s actions without being seen—and this recognition profoundly shaped my way of perceiving the world. Another formative experience occurred in elementary school: after watching MTV for many hours, I suddenly witnessed a pink piano floating across the living room, gliding silently from wall to wall. At the time I accepted it as reality, but it later revealed itself as an experience that blurred the boundary between reality and fiction, prompting questions about existence itself. These two formative encounters—an awareness of unseen structures and a questioning of reality—together constitute the roots of my thinking.
By deliberately displacing technologies from their intended uses and placing them into unforeseen contexts, I seek to render visible the “invisible structures” that govern collective life—fictions, codes, institutions, algorithms, ecological processes. My aim is to create tools through which participants can critically intervene, momentarily unsettling cognitive frameworks and social contours, and thereby opening new possibilities.
I value a speculative perspective that estranges the everyday and rewrites the world through the agency of fiction. This perspective is reinforced by the spirit of the Japanese tea ceremony, or chanoyu. Far from being a mere ritual, chanoyu can be understood as a “higher-dimensional play of the spirit” in which nature and humanity, matter and mind, reality and fiction intersect, destabilizing ordinary order and allowing another world to emerge. By further integrating new conceptions of life and humanity presented by advanced technologies and materializing them, I pursue an artistic practice that extends beyond the exhibition space to act directly upon society and the environment.
For me, the artwork does not reside in the finished object, but in the dynamic process that encompasses the discussions, collaborations, and environmental changes before and after. What is exhibited is merely a crystallized fragment of that continuum. What matters most is to make provisional forms of society appear and to share their transformations with others. Creativity, in my view, is not a privilege but a force embedded in everyday life, and the capacity to sculpt society belongs equally to all. My practice seeks to demonstrate this fact and to generate moments in which inequalities of creativity are redressed.
Awards / Fellowships / Residencies
(A = Awards / F = Fellowship / S = Scholarship / R = Residency / H = Honorary Mention)
Citizen-cooperative distributed logistics (DENSO + ALTERNATIVE MACHINE)
2006 – 2011
D
Software for multi-core Cell BE / SpursEngine (Fixstars)
2002 – 2006
D
Digital TV / STB middleware (Zentek Technology Japan)
2000 – 2002
D
Business-card management cloud service (Hash System)
Curatorial Projects
(E = Exhibition / P = Performance / C = Concept Design)
2024
E
Reframing– Official Exhibition of DESIGNART 2024 (DESIGNART | 18–27 Oct)
2022
C
Basic concept design for the international festival & ecosystem that will succeed the Japan Media Arts Festival (Agency for Cultural Affairs | Sep – Mar 2023)
