Ryuta Aoki

Born in Tokyo, Aoki grew up outside the formal education system from around the age of nine. Amid frequent moves, he spent a couple of years in Australia and New Zealand. He taught himself to program and, in 1999, co-founded a tech startup in Japan with friends. Over the following decade he moved to a startup building embedded operating systems and middleware, and then to one specialising in high-performance computing, working as both engineer and director.

In 2009 he was found to have cancer and underwent surgery and radiotherapy. In the middle of it, a wish took shape: to pass on to children the fascination of the world outside school, as the Discovery Channel and MTV had once done for him. Then a close friend died by suicide. Together with his own illness, it brought home how near death was, and he began to act on that wish. The treatment succeeded, and in 2010 he joined TEDxTokyo, which had begun the year before, as a volunteer. In 2011 he held Japan's first TEDxKids, running it with more than 100 volunteers; the way the community was built was recognised and introduced as a Best Practice of TEDx. That same year he founded VOLOCITEE as a base for this work; the places, companies and projects that followed were all started from there.

In 2014, together with 3331 Arts Chiyoda, an arts centre in Chiyoda, Tokyo, he founded 3331α, a studio exploring the meeting of artistic expression and technology. There he ran Art Hack Day, Japan's first art hackathon, which gave rise to more than 70 artist collectives — many of which went on to be invited to art festivals in Japan and abroad, with some receiving the Excellence Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival.

In 2016, with the tea master Soryo Matsumura, the wagashi artist Shiho Sakamoto and others, he founded The TEA-ROOM, an artist collective reinterpreting the spirit and philosophy of the way of tea for the present. In 2019, with the same two, he co-founded Mucha-Kucha Inc., a management company for artists working with the way of tea.

That same year, with Takashi Ikegami and Mizuki Oka, he co-founded ALIFE Lab., a community of artificial-life researchers. In 2017, again with Ikegami and Oka, he co-founded ALTERNATIVE MACHINE, a deep-tech startup applying artificial-life research to society. In 2018 he served as Director of ALIFE 2018, the first international conference on artificial life following the merger of European and American academic societies.

In 2018, prompted by preparations for the thirtieth anniversary of Makuhari Messe, Japan's largest convention centre, he launched METACITY, a research collective exploring possible urban futures. The METACITY Conference was held there the following year. METACITY went on to become the base for artistic R&D with partners including the MIT Media Lab and Keio University SFC, and many of the exhibitions and works that came to define his practice grew out of it.

Alongside building places and organisations, from around 2019 he also began making work of his own. It falls into four strands: Technology for Multi-Species, Shared Spiritual Protocols, Consensus Machines and Alternative Computations.

Technology for Multi-Species redirects technologies built for human benefit towards life beyond the human. It includes the ANH series (2019–), acoustic ecosystems of digital agents evolving through genetic algorithms, and the Bio Sculpture series (2021–), which uses a soil 3D printer extendable to 30 metres to bring three-dimensional wetland environments into being within the city.

Shared Spiritual Protocols reworks the high-context transmission of the pre-digital world, of which the way of tea is the exemplar: architecture, gesture, ritual and a few words raising an image in the mind that can then be shared with others. The strand's principal work, the SOTOROJI series (2020–), rebuilds the outer tea garden — the passage in which the dust of the secular world is shaken off before entering the tea room — out of tens of thousands to some 130,000 QR codes. The QR code is an emblem of that secular world, and at the same time a protocol newly written into the modern body: see one, and the camera opens by itself. Artificial Moons (2020) reworks the custom of moon-viewing: it projected artificial moonlight, trembling under an N-body simulation derived from the three-body problem, onto a 150-metre building, inaugurating the rituals of a fictional city. Its way of sculpting a cosmology by computation anticipated the later Alternative Computations.

Consensus Machines dissects the calculation by which a popular will is arrived at. New Rousseau Machine (2021) showed that changing the rule of aggregation changes the outcome that is chosen; Simulated Consensus (2024, National Asia Culture Center, South Korea) simulates the voting of tens of thousands of virtual voters played by AI agents, to interrogate the assumptions underlying democracy. In 2026 a new work in the strand was presented in EMERGENCE[Y] (Science Gallery Melbourne).

Alternative Computations sculpts, with quantum computers, the cosmologies of vernacular computing cultures. In 2026 the solo exhibition Alternative Computations — Worlds Otherwise Calculated was held as a Quantum Art Festival special exhibition at Spiral Garden, Tokyo, drawing more than 4,500 visitors over four days; a video of the work was also shown in The Bright Rainbow Dots (2026, the 1st Nam June Paik Media Art Festival).

As a curator, Aoki served as Creative Producer for the Agency for Cultural Affairs' 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 festival succeeding the Japan Media Arts Festival, which for a quarter of a century had been a cornerstone of media art in Japan and abroad.

Awards and selections include a fellowship at the Salzburg Global Seminar (2017); the Public Prize at the WIRED Creative Hack Award 2021; the Social Impact Award (Minister of Education Prize) in the Art Division of the 25th Japan Media Arts Festival (2022), the first awarded to a Japanese group; the ACC CREATORS Residency (National Asia Culture Center, South Korea, 2024); the Ethereum Foundation's first artist scholarship, the Devcon 7 Scholars Program (2024); and the inaugural cohort of WAN: Art & Tech Creators Global Network (Japan Arts Council, 2025).

In 2026, with the tea master Soryo Matsumura, with whom he had worked for more than a decade in The TEA-ROOM and Mucha-Kucha, he co-founded SHUHALLY, an artist-led international art & science institution, where he serves as CEO and artistic director. It is built on VOLOCITEE, which he had led since 2011, and METACITY, which he launched in 2018, and carries both commercial and non-profit activity. Investment agreements totalling one billion yen were signed at its launch. At SHUHALLY he explores worlds otherwise through local cultures and contemporary technology.