A futuristic transhuman love story
Channel, Somerset House’s new curated online space for art, ideas, and the artistic process, presents the new work Morphogenic Angels from artist collective Keiken.
A futuristic transhuman love story, Morphogenic Angels stems from Keiken’s new prototype role-playing game, set in a reimagined future 1000 years from now. This new RPG simulation explores a future in which humans have morphic upgrades that organically re-engineer them to have transhuman capabilities. The two central characters, Yaxu and Anamt’u’ul, explore our endless capacity for change and self-discovery in fantastical and unimaginable ways, as the characters live and love through cycles of drastic evolution.
In this intricately designed future, angels live for hundreds of years, but instead of experiencing the same life for this unimaginable period of time, they experience many different lifecycles. Endless cycles of evolution, drastically change the abilities, purposes and direction of these post-human being (referred to as Morphic Angels). Morphogenic Angels explores the longing to know oneself. Trusting others and falling in love through so many lived evolutions becomes an infinite task. So when Angels do fall in love it becomes so much more precious and fragile than what we can imagine today.
Keiken is an artist collective, co-founded by Tanya Cruz, Hana Omori and Isabel Ramos in 2015. Keiken’s collective title is taken from the Japanese word for experience; the lived experience being an idea at the core of their practice. They are building and imagining a Metaverse to simulate new structures and ways of existing and to test-drive possible futures. The metaverse is a fully immersive virtual space, allowing Keiken to become the architects and collaborators of the future. Creating speculative worlds through filmmaking, gaming, installation, Extended Reality (XR), blockchain and performance, they explore how societal introjection governs the way we feel, think and perceive.
Latest releases on Channel
Films: SERAFINE1369 (Jamila Johnson Small) artist profile film, centering around their exhibition and performance We Can No Longer Deny Ourselves at Somerset House. Jitish Kallat presents Whorled (Here After Here After Here). A film on the recent Somerset House commission O Barco / The Boat. PATH AI: On Human Centred Design, recording of panel moderated by Charlotte Webb featuring Daniel Chávez Heras and Kristina Pulejkova. Grounding Practice sessions by O YAMA O and Phoebe Collings James.
Editorial: Francesca Gavin asks “How do you think beyond the human?” which unpacks Keiken’s work and Harun Morrison discusses Jamila Johnson Small’s recent installation and event The Long Night.
About Somerset House
“Step inside, think outside”. As the home of cultural innovators, Somerset House is a site of origination, with a cultural programme offering alternative perspectives on the biggest issues of our time. We are a place of joy and discovery, where everyone is invited to Step Inside and Think Outside.
From our historic site in the heart of London, we work globally across art, creativity, business, and non-profit, nurturing new talent, methods and technologies. Our resident community of creative enterprises, arts organisations, artists and makers, makes us a centre of ideas, with most of our programme home-grown.
We sit at the meeting point of artistic and social innovation, bringing worlds and minds together to create surprising and often magical results. Our spirit of constant curiosity and counter perspective is integral to our history and key to our future.
About Channel
Drawing from Somerset House’s unique resident community, the digital platform will showcase a rolling programme of exclusive commissions, documentaries, films, podcasts, talks, interactive works and editorial content. Channel’s content has been created with accessibility in mind and will provide alternative ways of presenting information such as subtitles and transcripts.
Channel has been developed with support from the UK Government’s Culture Recovery Fund through Arts Council England.
