Sputniko! (Japanese-British, b. 1985), also known as Hiromi Ozaki, is a multimedia artist, designer and filmmaker. Her work explores the uneven impact of technology on women's lives through music videos, bioengineered organisms, wearable devices and generative art.,She was born in Tokyo to a British mother and a Japanese father, both mathematics professors, and started programming as a child.
She studied mathematics and computer science at Imperial College London, then worked as a programmer building interactive websites for clients including the BBC, MTV and Nike.Drawn to feminist performers such as Laurie Anderson, Sofia Coppola and Miranda July, she left engineering to study Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art under Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby.
In 2010 she exhibited Menstruation Machine – Takashi's Take, a film examining menstruation and gender that she posted on YouTube, drawing invitations from curators including Yuko Hasegawa in Tokyo and Paola Antonelli at MoMA. For The Moonwalk Machine – Selena's Step (2013) she designed a fictional device intended to help girls onto the moon, presenting it as a prototype without ever engineering a working version. For Red Silk of Fate – Tamaki's Crush (2016/2021) she worked with the geneticist Hideki Sezutsu to engineer silkworms that produce oxytocin-infused, red-glowing silk, realizing in the lab the invisible red thread of Asian mythology said to connect destined lovers.With the shoe designer Masaya Kushino she created Nanohana Heels (2022), leather high heels that mechanically plant rapeseed with each step, a reference to the flower's ability to draw radioactive particles from soil contaminated by the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
In 2022 she released The Nursery, her first generative NFT project, through the platform Bright Moments, donating a share of proceeds to the reproductive rights fund LegalAbortion.eth. That year she also made Menstrualverse for Unicorn DAO, a wearable that let metaverse avatars bleed, which the platform Decentraland rejected for showing menstrual blood.With the generative artist Kazuhiro Tanimoto she made Lucky Clover (2023), a 40-piece Art Blocks collection auctioned for Cure Alzheimer's Fund as part of the reGEN charity sale.In Tech Bro Debates Humanity (2024) she staged AI agents built with Google's NotebookLM as white-shirted men debating AI, democracy and space exploration, a critique of masculinist tech discourse.
She taught at the MIT Media Lab as an Assistant Professor and founded its Design Fiction Group from 2013 to 2017.Her work has been exhibited at MoMA and the Centre Pompidou, and is held in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.,
