A.A.Murakami’s living atmospheres

This spring, the artist duo A.A.Murakami entered a new level of public visibility: Azusa Murakami appeared on the TED2026 stage in Vancouver, the Airo Dress they developed with Iris van Herpen was worn by Eileen Gu at the 2026 Met Gala, and the duo is presenting a new work in the Uzbekistan National Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, running through November.

Our editor Nina Knaack sat down with the artists for a full conversation about the practice they have built over time, at a moment when that work is moving through museums and biennials and entering a broader public conversation.

Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves have worked together since founding Studio Swine in 2011. The name A.A.Murakami, which institutional biographies began using around 2020, now frames the immersive strand of their practice: large-scale environments built from fog, bubbles, plasma, scent, light and sound, and organised around what they call ‘ephemeral tech’.

Their practice has moved from The Passage of Ra at Miraikan in Tokyo to Floating World at M+ in Hong Kong, then to their first solo U.S. museum exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, while their work has also entered the permanent collections of MoMA, M+, and the Centre Pompidou.

In the rooms they build, a ring of fog can move with the gravity of sculpture and a mist-filled bubble can descend slowly enough to change the room’s tempo. Their exhibitions are shaped through airflow, temperature, pressure, timing, sound and bodily movement, so that space itself becomes part of the work. It unfolds around the viewer, and often through the viewer. This all rests on a careful process through which Murakami and Groves work with unstable phenomena, holding them ‘up’ long enough to be felt for a brief, magical moment.

From Studio Swine to A.A.Murakami

Any full account of A.A.Murakami has to begin with the longer arc of the collaboration. Studio Swine emerged in 2011 as a research-driven design practice shaped by resource politics, local material cultures and the question of how form might be rooted in place. Under the name A.A.Murakami, that inquiry has shifted toward atmosphere, perception and the engineering of transient states, though the deeper concerns remain recognisable: matter, environment, time, and the relation between technology and lived experience.

Their current work as A.A.Murakami is an exploration of how technological systems can remain subject to the same physical laws as the body, like humidity, air turbulence, and temperature. A.A.Murakami can thus be seen as the name now attached to a body of work that has been developing for years and that grew out of an earlier design practice into a more concentrated artistic language.

Ephemeral tech

The phrase Murakami and Groves use for that artistic language is ephemeral tech. In our conversation, they wanted to make sure to give the term more precision than it usually receives. “The word ephemeral is often used quite loosely,” they said. “It might refer to something that moves, or something that appears delicate or fleeting.” Their own definition begins with something more exact: “For us, ephemeral means something that physically comes into being and then disappears. It is fragile, unstable and temporary. The phenomenon exists only for a moment before dissolving again.”

That definition places their work squarely in the realm of matter. Fog thickens in the room; a bubble carries mist until it bursts; and plasma remains a physical event. The art shares both the same duration and the same environment as the viewer. M+ described this as a practice in which custom-built technology and transient materials are used to push questions about reality, artifice and digital life into bodily experience, and the duo’s own framing moves in the same direction. “Too much of life is spent on screens, in a dimension that does not age as bodies do,” Groves said. Their answer to this has been to make technology pass back into physical law.

Technology, in their account, therefore has to be built for the task. “The technology has to be genuinely developed rather than simply using something commercially available off the shelf,” they said. “Everything we make involves custom engineering and the development of technical systems designed specifically to produce these fleeting phenomena.” They describe ‘ephemeral tech’ as a form of art that moves beyond familiar interfaces such as screens, projections and LED arrays and uses fog, plasma and bubbles to create “entirely new, unnatural phenomena.” In their own words, the work begins to feel “like the emergence of a new kind of nature.”

That idea of a new kind of nature is one of the strongest ways into the practice. Murakami and Groves are not simply interested in making an atmosphere visible, they are interested in bringing natural materials into behaviours that would never arise on their own. “We try to create phenomena that feel akin to nature but do not exist within it,” they said. “These are conditions that can only appear through the interaction of natural forces and technological systems.” What draws them, finally, is “the moment when order appears out of turbulence or emptiness,” a thought they carried all the way to its largest implication: “In some ways this is also how life itself begins. A temporary pattern of organisation emerging from the void.”

How a work begins

For all the refinement of the finished installations, the beginnings of a project are quite ‘ordinary’. “Ideas usually begin simply by following our curiosity,” they said. “Often they start from an everyday observation that leads to a question.” One example began over a bowl of soup. “We were once eating miso soup with clams and became fascinated by the beautiful and diverse patterns on the shells. That led us to wonder how such patterns form in nature, and whether it might be possible to recreate the underlying system that generates them using generative code.”

That small story says a great deal about A.A.Murakami’s method: an observed pattern becomes a technical question, and a technical question expands into a system that can create form. “Once something captures our attention like that, we begin reading, sketching, discussing, and experimenting, making rough physical tests in the studio, and consulting with engineers. It is a gradual process of pulling on a thread and seeing where it leads.” In my opinion, this patience is one of the strengths of the work, with the pieces not feeling over-written.

Two minds, one studio logic

A.A.Murakami is also a duo in the fullest sense. “Most projects begin with conversations about what the work could be and what kind of experience it might create. Azusa has a very strong instinct for visual language and aesthetic atmosphere, while I tend to focus more on narrative framing and conceptual structure, as well as the development of the installations with the broader studio team,” Groves said. They also communicate the work differently: Murakami more through the studio’s visual channels, Groves more through texts, storyboards and film.

Even so, they resist fixed role-play. “In reality the work is not divided so neatly though. It develops through a constant dialogue between us. Ideas move back and forth, evolving through conversation until they reach places neither of us would have arrived at independently. In that sense the collaboration itself is really the engine of the work.”

Key works

A.A.Murakami’s practice really comes to life when seen through a sequence of works.

New Spring from 2017 was one of the first decisive public statements of ‘ephemeral tech’. The work presented mist-filled ‘blossoms’ in a disused Milan cinema, produced by a tree-like sculpture that drew on chandeliers, columns and arches. The bubbles disappeared on contact with skin, though they could be briefly held with special gloves. That structure already contains much of what would follow: engineering in the service of fragility, a shared social choreography, and a work completed through the audience’s timing.

With ∞ Blue (Infinity Blue) in 2018, the scale changed. Nearly nine metres tall and twenty tonnes in weight, the work paid homage to cyanobacteria and the planetary transformation initiated by oxygenic photosynthesis roughly three billion years ago. Cornish clay and oxide glazes tied the surface to local mining history, while reaction-diffusion patterns and scented smoke rings stretched the work across deep time, geology and atmosphere. What had been fragile in New Spring became monumental here, though still built around breath, scent and disappearance.

The M+ exhibition Floating World in 2024–25 marked another shift. M+ presented Beyond the Horizon and The Passage of Ra as two interlinked installations, one built around floating bubble clouds, the other around fog rings travelling toward a digital seascape. The museum described the show as a further development of ‘ephemeral tech’ and its interest in primordial origins and possible future scenarios. A.A.Murakami links this strand of the work to the discomfort of living through screens, speaking about the desire to make scenes that are fully real in person and then remain in memory after the viewer has gone.

The duo’s own reflections on Beyond the Horizon bring out another layer. A remark from their gallerist, David Chan – that the bubbles felt like beginnings while the fog rings felt like endings – helped them recognise that many of the works were giving “existence itself a kind of physical body.” From there they began thinking more consciously about 'mono no aware', about wonder and loss occupying the same moment, and about the emotional register of a form that appears, holds, and disappears.

The Houston version of Floating World in 2025 widened the frame. It was the duo’s first solo U.S. museum exhibition and their largest project to date, bringing together Cell, Neon Sun, Beyond the Horizon, Passage and Under a Flowing Field. Cell drew on scholar’s rocks, Zen gardens and the ocean floor; Neon Sun used custom glass tubes filled with noble gases and activated by electromagnetic fields. The overall exhibition pushed their practice into institutional questions of visitor flow, safety, maintenance and duration.

Then came The Cave in Milan in 2025, a new commission in which arm-like machines rose and fell from still liquid against a crimson screen, accompanied by bird-bone flutes and conch horns. The temperature of the work darkened here, and origins plus instruments came closer to the surface. This piece suggested that A.A.Murakami’s atmosphere can carry prehistory as easily as it carries futurity.

The why

When asked what they are engineering for, Murakami and Groves returned to a simple answer: experience. Speaking about New Spring, they described tuning the weight of the bubbles, their size, their glow, the way they bounced or broke, and then widened the point. “What we are really engineering is an experience.” To strengthen this, they compared their process to designing a garden: thinking about how people move, what they encounter and when.

That emphasis on experience does carry a harder question though. “The hardest problem for us is holding back entropy.” They described the challenge of making “extremely unstable, low entropy phenomena” run reliably and safely inside museums, often without a technician on site, while keeping the work fragile enough to feel alive. That is where the practical stakes of the works become inseparable from the philosophical ones. These are installations about transience, but they also have to be conservable, repeatable and insurable. “We create small artificial ecologies, systems designed to sustain improbable states for as long as possible.”

This is also where their digital practice comes in. In a 2023 conversation with Verse, Groves described generative code as a space where unpredictability can be allowed to enter the work, and where digital outcomes can later feed back into physical form. The ambition, as he put it there, is a future in which art moves fluidly between digital and physical realms, holding on to both ephemerality and permanence.

Looking ahead

Their next line of inquiry extends directly from this history. “We are very interested in how AI will transform the physical world and the way we experience it,” they said. The phrase they now use is PAI, or Physical AI. Here too the emphasis remains concrete: their installations rely on delicate systems that need constant adjustment in order for fragile phenomena to exist. “AI can act almost like a technician that we leave behind with the work. Monitoring, adjusting and maintaining these systems in real time.” They began experimenting with this approach in The Moon Under Water at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and the future they describe follows the same logic that has animated the practice from the start: systems that feel less like machines and closer to living environments.

That future is arriving at a moment when A.A.Murakami already occupies a distinctive position. With their current visibility – the TED stage, the Biennale, the museum circuit – the work still remains grounded in something slower and more exacting than visibility only. It is grounded in the problem of how matter can be brought into temporary order, how technology can hand off to physical law, and how a room can be made to hold a phenomenon just long enough for it to register in the body and remain in the mind.