Tactus: Echoes in the Flow

Born in 2007, Rio Nakada is an artist, filmmaker, and creative technologist working across drawing, XR, and interactive media. Their practice explores perception, embodiment, memory, consciousness, and the boundary between inner and outer worlds. Drawing on personal experience and research, Nakada transforms psychological and sensory states that resist language into works encountered through the body. In intuitive drawings, pre-verbal thoughts and emotions emerge as traces of perception. In VR and MR works, touch, dissociation, perceptual distortion, and fragmented memory become spatial narratives and embodied interactions. Major works include Tactus, an MR experience that evokes tactile sensation through vision, and Nox, an XR documentary rooted in lived experience of complex PTSD. Nox was selected for CineMart’s Lightroom programme at the 55th International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Tactus received the NICOGRAPH 2024 Best Demo Award. Nakada studies at Keio University. Born in 2007. An artist, filmmaker, and creative technologist based in Japan. Currently, I am enrolled in the Keio University Faculty of Environmental Information (SFC). While crossing analog and digital domains such as drawing, video, interactive media, VR, MR, spatial computing, etc., he explores the fragile boundaries between perception, physicality, consciousness, memory, and the inner world. The starting point of production is my own live experience and interdisciplinary research on psychology, cognitive science, human-computer interaction, etc. We are trying to translate experiences that are difficult to convey with words alone, such as senses, emotions, and states of consciousness, into forms that others can encounter and share through the body. In production, drawing occupies a central position. Thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations prior to being organized as language are recorded through lines and shapes drawn automatically and intuitively. They are not images to explain experiences; they are captured as traces of life left by perception itself on paper. Meanwhile, in XR and interactive works, personal experiences are transformed into spaces where the audience can enter. The viewer's hands, gaze, head movements, and body positions are incorporated as part of the work to create an experience where the boundaries between reality and imagination, self and environment, and existence and absence fluctuate. The main work “Tactus” is an MR work on the theme of cross-modal perception, which evokes sensations similar to touch through visual information. Through the experience of touching virtual objects such as water appearing in real space with bare hands, splitting them, and reconnecting them, we explore the generation of a feeling that “feels like you've touched” without using a physical tactile device. The work was selected for the 2023 Japan Media Art Creator Development Support Project, and received the Demo Exhibition Award at NICOGRAPH 2024. It was invited to exhibit at CEDEC 2025 academic research field interactive sessions, etc. The XR documentary “Nox” is a work that transforms trauma, dissociation, self-fragmentation, depersonalization, and perceptual distortion into spatial stories and physical interactions from a first-person perspective, based on one's own experience with complex PTSD. As a VR/MR experience that does not use a controller and progresses due to the viewer's own hands or body movements, it does not explain the inner world of the parties involved from the outside, but invites the audience into their unstable perception. It not only depicts pain and isolation, but also expresses the process of moving towards beauty, connection, and the will to continue living. The film was selected for the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry's “Creation Style” project for 2 consecutive years, and received the AiXR CREATIVE AWARD 2025 Student Category Excellence Award. In 2026, it was selected for the Cinemart “Lightroom” category of the 55th Rotterdam International Film Festival. In 2022, he was selected as an Apple WWDC22 Swift Student Challenge winner. The solo exhibition “Tactus: Echoes in the Flow” was held in 2024, and solo exhibitions “Nox” and “Melting Contours, Filling Water” were held at Daikanyama Hillside Terrace in 2025. His films have been presented at international film festivals, academic conferences, media art exhibitions, invited exhibitions, etc. In 2026, I was selected as a Kuma Foundation Creator Scholar. What runs through this practice is an interest in the tension that arises between the opposing forces of pain and hope, fragility and strength, loneliness and connection. Through both drawing and advanced technology, they give shape to experiences that are invisible and difficult to explain and share, and continue to question how perception creates understanding of self and the world.