Simulacra in the Social Interstice: Emi Kusano and the Ontological Inquiry of the AI Era

Introduction — The Nostalgia and Uncanniness of Nonexistent Memories
What the audience confronts in Emi Kusano’s work are “memories that never existed.” Even while recognizing them as fabrications, viewers experience an irresistible déjà vu as these images penetrate the depths of consciousness. Fragments of the artist’s childhood records and everyday postwar Japanese scenes—collective memories that are at once intimate and historical—intersect with future-oriented technologies such as AI and biometric data. This strange collision destabilizes the very foundation of our identity, oscillating between nostalgia and unease.
This genealogy can be traced back to artistic practices of the late twentieth century. In the 1970s, Cindy Sherman staged mediated images of women through her photography, exposing the fundamentally fictive construction of identity [Krauss, 1985]. For Sherman, photography was not a means of fixing the “authentic image of the subject” but a technique to displace and repeat images, thereby rendering visible how identity is continuously performed and manipulated. Kusano’s practice, too, can be situated as an extension of this lineage of identity critique. Yet what she addresses is not the “socially assigned roles” of media, but rather “generated memories.” What her work makes visible is not merely the fictive nature of the subject, but the fragility of “memory” itself as the very ground on which subjectivity rests.
This problematic takes on particular resonance within postwar Japanese culture. In the 1990s, the Japanese SF anime Ghost in the Shell—developed by Mamoru Oshii and Masamune Shirow—posed the philosophical paradox: if both brain and body are mechanized, can the self still endure? Kusano inherits this question while transposing it into the dimension of “AI-generated memory.” That is, if memory itself is generated by AI, can we still be said to live with a “past” or to inhabit “history”? This inquiry exceeds the domain of aesthetics, carrying profound political, epistemological, and ethical implications for the present.
What is at stake here is nothing less than a redefinition of the relationship between memory and subjectivity. In Western modernity, memory has been understood as the foundation guaranteeing personal identity. Yet the generation of “nonexistent memories” by AI fundamentally destabilizes this model. The “I” no longer appears as the proprietor of preserved memory, but as a being caught within circuits of continuously generated memories. Kusano’s work functions as a critical apparatus that renders this transformation visible.
In this sense, Kusano’s practice opens onto new epistemological and ethical questions regarding memory and subjectivity in the twenty-first century, an era increasingly dominated by AI. This is the core theme of the present essay. In the chapters that follow, I examine the exhibition’s spatial design, the social and cultural contexts in which it operates, and its philosophical significance. Chapter Two analyzes how the installation apparatus itself is designed as an “interrogation chamber” that implicates the viewer. Chapter Three situates Kusano’s work within the framework of Yuk Hui’s theory of “cosmotechnics,” exploring how it offers an alternative to the Western model of memory as preservation. Chapter Four situates the work in relation to Japanese anime futurism and posthumanist discourse, examining its expression of the plasticity of boundaries. Finally, Chapter Five concludes by addressing the ethical and political stakes of memory and subjectivity in the AI era, positioning Kusano’s work as a critical intervention in the history of contemporary art.

Replicated Faces, Fragmented Bodies: The Synthesis of Asian Public Space and the Technological Subject

In Emi Kusano’s installation EGO In the Shell, what appears on CRT monitors and screens are fragments of the artist’s personal records, reconstructed by AI. Repeatedly projected are not grand historical narratives, but ritualized and everyday public spaces specific to Asia: the codified gestures of a wedding ceremony, the silence and procession of a funeral, the orderly alignment of commuters on trains. These scenes constitute accumulations of disciplined bodily practices rooted in Japanese local communities and social habits, which have long formed the cultural foundation of postwar Japan.
It is no coincidence that Kusano repeatedly summons these images. Generative AI is heavily biased toward Western datasets, producing images that distort or erase precisely such local and vernacular memories. What the algorithm tends to reproduce as the “universal memory of the world” is a standardized global landscape in which regionality and lived practices are largely absent. Kusano identifies in this erasure a critical opening: she deliberately forces AI to generate anti-modern, indigenous memories that evade Western comprehension, and returns these distorted images back to the viewer’s body.
What emerges is a different mode of subjectivity, grounded not in Western individualism but in Japanese and broader Asian cultural traditions. Through the repetition of disciplined bodily practices, the individual in Japanese society is embedded in an aesthetic of attunement and adaptation to the group. The “self” is not constituted as an autonomous, independent entity, but instead appears only temporarily, in mutual interdependence with others and the environment. This perspective resonates with the Buddhist concept of pratītyasamutpāda (dependent origination), which understands the self not as a consistent essence but as a relational event that is continually generated.
The image of the “generated subject” also recurs in Asian religious representations of the body. In the fourteenth century, Tsongkhapa, the greatest scholastic of Tibetan Buddhism, taught that the body is not a fixed substance but a mutable process that transforms through practice, becoming a site of enlightenment itself. The Standing Figure of the Monk Baozhi(8th century, Kyoto National Museum), with its three faces and six arms, exemplifies a body that transcends the unified contours of the individual, presenting instead a being split, multiplied, and layered. Such figures extend the self across multiplicity, manifesting subjectivity as a totality of relations with others and the cosmos. Likewise, the many-faced and many-handed figures of Asura or the Thousand-Armed Kannon articulate the coexistence of conflicting interiorities and multiple gazes, dismantling the unity of the subject and making visible the multiplicity within a single being.
The “replicated faces” and “fragmented bodies” that recur in Kusano’s work are contemporary variations of this lineage of Asian corporeal philosophy. They are not mere futuristic cyborgs, but continuations of an iconographic tradition in which subjectivity arises through division, multiplication, and relational generation. In this sense, EGO In the Shellinherits Asian religious conceptions of the body while simultaneously expanding them toward the Ghost in the Shell-inspired vision of a “networked subject.” Kusano’s replicated faces and fragmented bodies thus re-perform ancient Asian images of the self as multiplicity, fracture, and relational embodiment, even as they prefigure the future of the technological subject emerging at the limits of AI and biotechnology.

As Cosmotechnics: Reading Through Asian Philosophy of Technology

The Hong Kong philosopher Yuk Hui, currently Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Erasmus University, argued in The Question Concerning Technology in China (2016) that Western modern universalism, which regards technology as a neutral tool, must be critiqued, and that technology should instead be rethought as cosmotechnics—the unity of cosmic order and moral order. In other words, technology does not take the same universal form across cultures, but should unfold differently according to each culture’s cosmology and ethical framework [Hui, 2016]. This perspective provides a way to resist the homogenizing consumption of AI and biotechnology as globalized technologies, and to instead recognize the possibility of multiple cosmotechnics, each grounded in distinct cultural contexts.

Emi Kusano’s practice exemplifies one such pluralistic vision of technology. Her use of AI is not designed to reproduce the Western model of memory as “the preservation of data,” but rather to deviate from it, presenting an alternative figure of the technological subject. In Kusano’s work, AI does not function as a medium for fixing records, but as a device that visualizes relations in continual generation. Put differently, Kusano is not universalizing AI within a global framework but re-situating AI within an Asian cosmological context.

From this perspective, the motifs of “replication” and “fragmentation” that recur in her work deserve particular attention. In dialogue with Hui’s thought, these motifs challenge the Western modern assumption of the “individual” as an absolute unit, instead depicting the subject as a de-modernized existence generated within a mesh of relations. What Kusano’s works disclose is not a single universal technological world, but the possibility of multiple technological worlds, each producing distinct modes of subjectivity.

In this sense, EGO In the Shell is not merely a visualization of the plasticity of memory, identity, or the body. It is a living example of what Hui calls “new cosmotechnics,” an artistic practice that relativizes the universality of technology and presents alternative futures grounded in particular cultural cosmologies.

The Ethics of “Synthesized Memory”: A Re-Reading Through 1990s Japanese SF Anime

Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (1995) placed at its thematic core the question of how memory might be treated as pliable data within a cybernetic society. Kusano’s installation for this exhibition takes inspiration from one of its most symbolic scenes, the so-called “Garbage Truck Man.” He discovers during interrogation that the very motivation behind his actions had been hacked—his memories of a wife and child implanted from the outside. Confronted with this, the audience too faces a stark thesis: that a person’s life story, even one’s freedom to choose how to live, can be rewritten and controlled by external agents.

Ghost in the Shell also shattered the modern assumption of memory as “a possession to be preserved.” Memory is redefined by the super-AI known as the Puppet Master not as a faithful archive but as a mutable record, continually replicated, altered, and synthesized within the network. In the climactic scene where Major Motoko Kusanagi chooses to merge with the Puppet Master, what takes place is not mere fusion but the beginning of a new collective memory—each absorbing the vulnerability of the other, dissolving individuality into a shared continuity. The subject no longer appears as the “owner of memory,” but as an event of synthesizing memory itself.

This problematic re-emerges in Kusano’s EGO In the Shell. When AI generates memory, the past ceases to be judged by its “truth or falsity” and instead becomes a matter of protocols: in which network, with whom, under what conditions was it synthesized? In other words, the meaning of history is reconstituted not on the basis of authenticity but on the procedures of synthesis. Since generative AI processes vast quantities of data that consist of endlessly copied and recombined simulations—simulacra lacking original referents—the criterion of “truth” is invalidated. What must be interrogated instead are the sources of datasets, the conditions of algorithms, and the authority and responsibility of access and modification. Kusano visualizes this by incorporating her own private photographs as datasets, turning back on the audience the process by which AI dissolves memory into something “real-seeming.”

Another major anime of the same decade, Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995–96), also questioned memory and subjectivity at their foundations. In its finale, the human body is reduced to the substance LCL, and all humanity dissolves into a single ocean of shared being. Memory here is no longer an individual archive but drifts as a totalized, interpenetrating memory. This utopian/dystopian structure resonates with today’s condition, where AI generates averaged memory-images from massive datasets. Dissolving individuality into the collective may heal solitude and fracture, yet it also risks erasing difference and deviation as mere noise. In the final scene, however, Shinji Ikari chooses “re-individuation,” accepting wounds and divergences as constitutive of his existence.

Kusano’s work stages this same ethical problem. AI-generated memory dissolves into the totalized data pool, offering images of memory that belong to no one. Yet by summoning vernacular Japanese and Asian public spaces—memories neglected or erased in global datasets—she resists this totalization and returns the possibility of re-individuation to the viewer. In Kusano’s art, “synthesized memory” does not simply affirm the pleasures of generation; it forces us to confront the issue of how to institutionalize the right to reassert singularity within protocols of synthesis.

Re-Contextualizing Emptiness: No Ghost Just a Shell

In parallel with 1990s Japanese SF anime, the contemporary art field also drew from Ghost in the Shell to make these problems visible. This was exemplified by No Ghost Just a Shell (1999–2003), a collaborative project by French artists Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno. They purchased the rights to the anime character “Annlee” from a Japanese animation studio and made her available to multiple artists. In doing so, they exposed the structure of the animation industry, which consumed fiction by circulating character shells devoid of subjectivity.

Annlee herself had no unique backstory, existing only as a vessel to be “used” within the market. Yet, by turning this emptiness into a critical device, multiple artists inscribed meaning onto her, and in some instances she was even granted rights approaching those of a real human being.

Three aspects were particularly foregrounded: (1) the separation between bodily representation and narrative, (2) the creation of memory through a network of multiple authors, and (3) the process by which a single image differentiates as it traverses various nations and cultures. Contemporary AI operates in an analogous way: it learns from multinational, fragmented simulacra, producing memory-images that lack clear referents, echoing the condition Annlee had already anticipated.

Kusano’s work inherits this notion of “emptiness” but develops it differently. Her critical focus lies in the way AI excessively alters and rewrites facts and memories, producing an expansion of subjectivity while simultaneously eroding substance. For Kusano, emptiness is no longer merely the hollow shell of a character awaiting inscription, but the pervasive condition of a world saturated by fictions indistinguishable from reality.

This shift marks a profound difference from the late 1990s. Whereas No Ghost Just a Shell critiqued the circulation of subject-less characters in a pre-digital, industrial context, Kusano confronts the 21st century condition in which AI and networks generate fictions that infiltrate everyday memory itself. Her practice reveals emptiness not as absence, but as the unstable ground upon which identity, memory, and even politics are incessantly fabricated and dissolved.

Conclusion：Art in the Age of Synthetic Memory

Emi Kusano’s EGO In the Shell series is a practice that fundamentally reexamines the meaning of memory, subjectivity, and history in an era where AI generates “memories that never existed.” Her work does not remain at the level of technical experimentation or futuristic vision; rather, it reconfigures cultural and philosophical foundations to confront the ethics of “synthetic memory,” and the fundamental questions that lie at its core.

What Kusano’s work demonstrates is a radical shift: in the age of AI, the meaning of memory and history is no longer grounded in authenticity, but in protocol. In other words, memory is not defined by faithfully preserving the past, but by the procedures and governance that determine from which datasets, under what conditions, and by whom memory is synthesized.

Her work resists the tendency of generative AI, under the guise of global standardization, to erase local and cultural memory. By recursively generating vernacular public spaces and embodied practices, Kusano enacts a form of cultural critique that asks: What kinds of memory deserve to endure into the future?

Equally crucial is the ethical imperative she raises: such “protocols of synthesis” cannot merely absorb memory into a homogenized totality. Instead, they must institutionalize the right for differences and deviations to be archived and synthesized as they are—without erasure.

As we have seen, EGO In the Shell simultaneously inherits traditional Asian iconographies of the body, engages with the memory debates opened by 1990s Japanese SF anime and contemporary art, and extends them into a new ethical horizon of the AI era. To restate: the past and history can no longer be understood as repositories of fact. They must instead be grasped as fields continuously updated within protocols of synthesis, where the right to shift from anonymity to singularity becomes the very ground of contestation.

Kusano’s practice thus stands at the vanguard of what might be called the art of the synthetic memory age. It is an artistic practice that anticipates the philosophical and aesthetic challenges of our time, and opens them before us as a prophetic vision.