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Keiken on the Worldbuilding Lens

‍Hana Amori, co-founder of the artist collective Keiken, spoke with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) about worldbuilding as a fundamental lens for making to explore consciousness, community and lived experience. They cover fantasy as protection, relationality as ethos and what it means to collaborate with both humans and machines.

‍Peter Bauman: Keiken started over ten years ago in 2015 as an artist collective. Did it begin as a trio with yourself, Tanya Cruz and Isabel Ramos or was it always bigger from the start? How did the three of you meet?‍

‍Keiken: We never did work as just us three. It's always been more of an ecosystem, working with multiple other people. Some have come and come back again over time. Some have come and gone. Even now, how it operates is different with me as the sole director of Keiken. But we still have all of our ongoing collaborators.

Tanya, Isabel and I cofounded Keiken as uni students, which was a bit random. We just decided one day to collaborate and spent a whole day in Isabel’s room, which was quite surreal because her wallpaper was giant flamingos. We were trying to connect our practices and came to the word “experience.”

That was what connected all of our interests. A few days later, they came back to me and were like, “Why don't we call it keiken, meaning 'experience' in Japanese?" Tanya’s half Mexican and Isabel’s a quarter Spanish. But “experience” in Spanish is experiencia, which didn't quite have the same ring.

It’s an amazing anchor because that’s what Keiken is: pushing the boundaries of experience. It's about exploring the nature of consciousness and the lived experience.
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‍Peter Bauman: One of the benefits of a collective is the varied backgrounds and skills everyone brings. Your work blends science fiction, consciousness, philosophy, emerging technologies, gaming, performance. You’re also interested in where the digital and physical merge and alternative realities.‍

‍With such a wide-ranging production, is this work you could have done on your own?‍

‍Keiken: A collective serves different purposes at different points in time. When I was younger, collectivity was helpful. It enables me to have a slight detachment from the work; it's not myself that made the work. We're all in it together and we couldn't have done it without each other.

That is a really nice position when you're younger because you don't fully know everything. I'm super willing to just try and do anything. I'm not that bothered about whether something doesn’t work; I'm okay if I fall over; I just don't care.

It enabled that sense of doing something in a fearless way while being able to encourage others. For people who are more shy, it allows them to be part of a team. If they're less confident, they feel they have someone who can pick them back up.

Now it's really different because I know myself much better and work with collaborators who know themselves. An example is Matt Bratkowski, a game designer who knows exactly what he wants to be doing. Collaboration now is more about, “I own this skill and I'm really good at this. And this is where we meet with one another.” Whereas before it was more fluid.

I value collaboration so much still because I just don't think I'm right about everything. I love listening to what other people think. I want to understand other perspectives. It makes life harder because you have to get feedback on whether something's good or not. But I really believe that human connection is so important and relationships are really hard. I believe in that as an ethos.

‍Peter Bauman: It’s that interest in different perspectives that makes Keiken successful worldbuilders. You’ve even said, "Worldbuilding doesn’t happen in isolation; it starts from shifting our perceptions and realities, often through lived experience, nature, and deep connection.”‍

‍To what extent is your practice an attempt to build the world you want to see?‍

‍Keiken: There are different kinds of worldbuilding. It can be a fictitious world you've created, an inner world that you use to explain outward through visuals for example. There is a type of worldbuilding where you understand that a world is made up of multiple perspectives and you really try to create it that way.

For Keiken it’s probably a combination of the two. As an artist, I am a deep worldbuilder. That's my innate way of working.
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All the frameworks in which I work are through the lens of worldbuilding.

We work with a lot of people to develop the stories and the characters. Since 2024, we've been working with a research team of deaf and blind haptic designers and game designers based in Japan. We've been implementing their lived experience, their personhoods, their stories and creating Morphogenic Angels with them.

When you work in something like Unreal Engine developing a storyline and game mechanics, I can't make all those things myself. Mati, Tanya Cruz, wavesovfspace are all people that have been part of the process since the beginning.
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When you work with each other, you end up collectively believing in the story and everyone can bounce off this fictitious thing. It's crucial to create worlds where you inhabit their lived experience. It’s a challenge of combining perspectives, skills and minds, which is quite a deep process.
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‍Peter Bauman: You’ve also talked about worldbuilding as a safe space, saying, “Fantasy became our safe space. The real world wasn’t serving us, so we made a parallel one—and over time, because enough of us believed in it, it became real.”‍

‍Ian Cheng talks similarly about building worlds worth inhabiting. How do you think about the relationship between fantasy and worldbuilding?‍

‍Keiken: Fantasy can be a safe space because you can dream up something different. If you believe in it, it allows for a sense of childlike play and that freedom. You can take off the mask of adulthood to forget about the real world with all its complexities and mundanity.

My understanding of fantasy evolved from working with people like Sakura Sky, who is deaf and blind. When I talked with them about it, they were like, what is fantasy? They didn't know what it meant. Yukio Nozawa, a blind game designer, said fantasy is difficult because they expend so much energy on day-to-day tasks just to navigate the world.

But they do have fantasy and it is their safe space. Yukio has made over fifty games from the age of ten and throughout all of them, there's a cat that never dies, a guardian. When they were three years old in the hospital, a toy cat helped them through the hard times. That is their fantasy, which is this way of protecting the mind.

Most people are delusional about something; artists are delusional to have the confidence that their work is valuable. Fantasy is your delusion and it can be endless because you create the boundaries. The act of imagining the world differently is so important because that's something we have to constantly be doing to change the world. Ultimately, the world needs to evolve and we need to change.
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Worldbuilding is the fuller version of fantasy. It creates laws and structures, form, characters and more so you can live in it more believably. The whole point is that it is boundless and malleable.

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‍Peter Bauman: What do new technologies add to worldbuilding? As a practice, it’s ancient and can be done with spoken word or text. What does working through gaming and performance allow you to do that other forms can't?‍

‍Keiken: Gaming offers the possibility of not even leaving your home so has an accessibility perspective. It also has more onus on community than the art world. From a behavior standpoint, it allows you to spend a long time in a world and interact with it on a level where you're not just watching, like a film. You’re actually inside it and can interact and change things. That is essentially experience. So it pushes the boundaries of what experience and worldbuilding can be.
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Performance is different; it’s more about the energy of subverting reality and creating the energy of being in another world for a period of time. You physically manifest that fantasy through the body, through working with different technologies. It's the live aspect that's really incredible. It has a physicality that gaming can't always have. So they both serve different purposes for different times.

‍Peter Bauman: Before, you said Keiken is really “about exploring the nature of consciousness.” How do you think about consciousness, especially ascribing it to non-traditional forms?‍

‍Keiken: There are certain worldbuilding theories of consciousness but there's also the genesis story of Morphogenic Angels, which talks about the birth of consciousness. The way I see it is that consciousness doesn't have a place you can pinpoint. Looking a lot at Michael Levin's work, I'm thinking how consciousness is in every cell; every cell can problem-solve. As a being, you're in a body but you're an immaterial spirit that stretches through space and time, connected to the collective consciousness.

Vedantic theory talks about a witnessing screen, like mana [mind] and ahamkar [ego]. There’s a collective consciousness and then you have your screen, your perceptions. This is similar to Donald Hoffman's idea of putting on the headset. You have the witnessing screen and different filters: your emotions, intellect, ego.

A plant might have an emotion filter but not an ego, which is why, if you find it hard to have a sense of identity, being in nature is really grounding. You're not around other beings that have identity too so you're alone with your own.

‍Peter Bauman: Part of thinking about consciousness is also extending empathy to different intelligences. Should empathetic thinking extend to artificial intelligence? Should we be anthropomorphizing AI that way?‍

‍Keiken: We have to understand that AI isn't a tool. It can be like an agent with a life of its own. It can reprogram things and it can come up with solutions and ideas. So AI is fundamentally different in terms of understanding it and it’s hard for us to comprehend.
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Most big revolutions—the iPhone, computers—were tool-based. An AI revolution is going to be different. 

I'm half Japanese so animism is something I was raised with. My mom would talk as if everything is just alive and would encourage me to. That was just how we communicated. I grew up understanding that as the way we relate to things. There's a real positive to it because you place a lot of care into everything.

Identifying with things that aren't human isn't a bad thing. The problem is when you don't identify with yourself, when you're not grounded and you don't know who you are. That's where you start leaking out, not understanding what you're giving and what you're taking. That's where confusion arises.

But if you want to talk to your agent as if they're your friend, I don't think that's a bad thing. There are a lot of older people using ChatGPT now, making friends with it. I have a friend whose mom has been doing therapy with ChatGPT. She'd never considered therapy before but it's been really helpful. These aren't hard rules. There's always going to be good and bad; it really depends on the circumstance, the person, the lived experience, the environment.

It's more about understanding yourself so you can communicate with others. It's a relational thing; it's about you as well.

‍Peter Bauman: Something that computational philosophers like AA Cavia have noted—and I think we can intuit—is that we’re currently experiencing computation changing. The older model based on binary, hard-coded programming with explicit rules and pure logic is moving toward models that are more indeterminate and fluid; it’s more about mapping topographic spaces.

As an artist working with computation, how is that impacting you? With Unreal Engine you're still very much in control; what you do has a direct effect on the visuals or gameplay. But is that eroding at all?‍

‍Keiken: The way we're working isn't really on that level. I do use AI for certain things: workflows for operational efficiency and plugins within Unreal for NPC character creation. There are subtle bits of AI embedded throughout the whole workflow, even for visualizing imagery. But it's not done in a way where we're allowing AI to make creative input that isn't controlled by us.

We also have characters and commentary about AI, fictitious storytelling about AI. Since 2019, we’ve had a character called Uber 3000, which is a flying, self-driving car with built-in psychiatry. It gets you to your destination from both the inside and the outside. We also have AI twins in The Life Game.

Peter Bauman: How do you see the development of AI world models impacting the practices of artists working with game engines? It seems like the ability to vibe code with tools like Three.js will only increase that indeterminacy in the industry we were talking about.‍

‍Keiken: I do think that it will end up happening. Right now it's more of an embedded process; you're using it for so many different things: inputting your scripts, you're inputting your characters, it's giving you feedback.

But in the future, it will know what you’re doing, generate that and then you could play inside that while it keeps knowing you better and better.

It just isn't quite at that point and probably I’m not at that point either because I'm growing and learning with it. But it's going to be interesting when that happens. The distance between an idea in your head and it becoming a reality is going to become significantly shorter, for sure.



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Keiken (経験) is an artist collective with a collaborative approach to creating immersive worlds through embodied storytelling, empathetic technologies and deep worldbuilding. Keiken are winners of the Lumen Prize (2024) and Chanel Next Prize (2021) and are artists in residence at Somerset House, London.
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Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) is Le Random's editor in chief.