Ryuta Aoki is a Japanese artist, artistic director, conceptual designer, system architect, software engineer, entrepreneur, and social sculptor based in Tokyo. He explores “societies as they could be” through an installation-centred practice at the intersection of art, science, and technology. From concept design to the process architecture for artistic research and development, he steers projects through to exhibitions and conferences where knowledge and aesthetics converge. Grounded in a Japanese view of nature embodied by chanoyu, the tea ceremony, his work absorbs emerging techno-scientific perspectives on life and humanity, seeking forms of practice that intervene directly in ecological and social realities beyond the gallery.
Selected exhibitions include the Kitakyushu Future Creation Art Festival (Japan, 2020); the Chiba City Festival of Arts (Japan, 2021); “2121 Futures In-Sight” at 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT (Japan, 2021); “Trusting the Unseen” (Thailand, 2023); and “AI・Human・Multiverse” (Korea, 2023).
In 2024, Aoki became the inaugural artist recipient of the Ethereum Foundation’s Artist Scholarship and, in the same year, the first Japanese participant in the residency programme at the Asia Culture Center (ACC) in Gwangju. The following year he joined the first cohort of the Agency for Cultural Affairs’ Art & Tech Creators Global Network, a fellowship programme aimed at enhancing the international presence of Japanese media art.
His honours include the Public Prize at the WIRED Creative Hack Award 2021 and the Social Impact Prize (Minister of Education Award) at the 25th Japan Media Arts Festival 2022—the first time the distinction was awarded to a Japanese team.
Artist Statement
I take Joseph Beuys’s concept of social sculpture—the idea that society is a malleable material that art can reshape—as my point of departure. My practice fuses that principle with a science-fiction gaze and contemporary technology, recasting social sculpture as a future-oriented experiment.
The materials I work with fall into three interdependent strata. Informational materials—data, algorithms, and distributed protocols—encode speculative blueprints. Environmental materials—soil, moss, light, and wind—manifest autonomous generative processes. Social materials—collective thought, action, and communal relationships—supply kinetic energy and feedback. Each project blends these strata in shifting ratios: information inscribes the space, environment mutates over time, and social participation drives the cycle outward. My aim is to establish a loop in which information shapes the environment, the environment rewrites information, and people are drawn so deeply into that exchange that it begins to work on the psyche itself.
To trigger this loop, I dislocate existing technologies from their primary uses and place them in contexts they were never meant for. By redesigning human-centred tools into vessels open to multispecies agency, I introduce micro-distortions into social structures, institutions, and cognitive biases, thereby broadening the field of the possible.
The true body of the work is the ongoing process—the discussions, collaborations, ecological changes, and social transformations that unfold before and after each exhibition—while any displayed object is merely a crystallised snapshot. I value the fleeting appearance of a provisional, as-yet-unseen society and the sharing of its evolution; by foregrounding that moment I seek to affirm that creative agency is universally latent and that narrowing the creativity divide is itself a sculptural act upon society. That conviction is why I pursue social sculpture, and why I regard such moments as deserving the name art.
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)
2021
E
Exhibition: Jack into the Noösphere — Chiba City Festival of Arts (Chiba City | Jul – Aug)
2020
E
The Exhibition of Multi-Layered City Makuhari (Chiba City | Dec – Jan 2021)
E
Japan Media Arts Distributed Museum – airport editions: Centrair / Naha / Fukuoka (Agency for Cultural Affairs | Feb–Mar)
2018
E
ALIFE Art Award Exhibition “Being There” (ALIFE 2018 | Jul)
P
Shipboard Tea Ceremony (Mar)
E
Art Hack Day Exhibition 2018 “Being There” (Miraikan | Mar)
2016
E
Art Hack Day Exhibition 2016 “Technology as Organism” (Nov)
P
Glowing Tea Ceremony (Sanrio Puroland | Oct)
P
Sound Tea Ceremony (TAICOCLUB | Jun)
2015
E
3331α Art Hack Day Exhibition 2015 (3331 Arts Chiyoda | Sep)
2014
E
Art Hack Night 2014 (Loftwork | Sep)
E
3331α Art Hack Day Exhibition 2014 (3331 Arts Chiyoda | Sep)
2012
E
Exhibition: Design to Change the World —Trans Arts Tokyo (3331 Arts Chiyoda | Sep – Oct)
Conference / Event Direction
(C = Conference / S = Symposium / A = Award)
2024
S
Creative Futurists Initiative (University of Tokyo | 22 Feb)
2020
S
The Exhibition of Multi-Layered City Makuhari (DOMMUNE | 30 Dec)
