press release
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 introspection governs the way we feel, think and perceive.
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.
LINK: Channel
LINK: Keiken
