AUGMENTED EMPATHY : Keiken, Sakeema Crook and Ryan Vautier

3 Sep 2020-14 Feb 2021

Overview

As part of The Living Planet, our year-long programme which focuses on the non-human, and deals with themes such as climate change, ecology, and communication, the artist collective Keiken have developed a multi-layered participatory project called Augmented Empathy. Developed as a new collaborative commission with FACT’s Learning team, the artists designed a project which mirrors the way we, and specifically young people, learn through the navigation of social media. Keiken are a cross-dimensional collaborative practice (Hana Omori, Isabel Ramos and Tanya Cruz), whose practice merges the physical with the digital by building online worlds and augmented realities. In Augmented Empathy, the collective explores the subversion of existing tools -in this case, Instagram filters- and how social media can be used as a space for exchange and artistic creation. The result was 4 Instagram filters which can be downloaded and used by anyone.