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

Introduction — The Nostalgia and Uncanniness of Non-existent Memories

Yohsuke Takahashi
Curator of the exhibition

In Emi Kusano’s work, what the viewer encounters in an unguarded moment is a “non-existent memory.” Even while one understands these to be outright fictions, they slip into the depths of consciousness and awaken an irresistible déjà vu. Private records from the artist’s childhood and fragments of everyday postwar life in Japan intersect with futuristic technologies under the intervention of AI. At that point of contact, a strange nostalgia and a sense of disquiet begin to swirl, unsettling the very foundations of our identity.

This lineage can be traced back to artistic practices in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the 1970s, Cindy Sherman performed female images circulating in the media through photography, exposing the fictive nature of identity [Krauss, 1985]. Photography did not capture “the subject’s true image”; rather, through repetition and slippage, it served as a device that made visible how the subject is constantly generated by social performance and manipulation. Kusano’s practice belongs to this genealogy, yet what her gaze pierces is not “social roles” but “generated memory.” What comes into view there is less the fictionality of the subject than the fragility of “memory” itself as the foundation that supports the subject.

This problematic bears a cultural density particular to postwar Japan. Developed by film director Mamoru Oshii and manga artist Masamune Shirow and exerting global influence, the science-fiction film Ghost in the Shell posed the paradox: “If both brain and body are mechanized, can the self still persist?” While inheriting this question in a contemporary register, Kusano displaces it into the dimension of “memory” generated by AI. If memory itself is produced by AI, can we still be called beings who live “the past” and “history”? The question exceeds aesthetic experiment and takes on fundamental implications in political, epistemological, and ethical registers.

What is being asked here is a redefinition of the relationship between memory and the subject as such. In Western modernity, memory was regarded as the basis that guarantees personal identity. Yet the “non-existent pasts and histories” produced by AI undermine that basis at its foundations. The “I” no longer appears as the owner of memory but as a being caught up in circuits of continuously generated pseudo-memory. Kusano’s work functions as a critical apparatus that visualizes this shift.

Emi Kusano’s practice opens new epistemological and ethical problems concerning memory and subject in the twenty-first century, as AI becomes ubiquitous. This essay will clarify its significance step by step, from exhibition design to social background and cultural foundations. Chapter 1 analyzes the work’s distinctiveness through Asian ritual spaces and religious iconography; Chapter 2 interprets issues of technology and gender from a feminist perspective; Chapter 3, drawing on the philosophy of Hong Kong thinker Yuk Hui, positions Kusano’s practice as an alternative to Western models of memory; and Chapter 4 explores connections with Japanese anime culture and posthuman theory. In conclusion, by synthesizing the ethical and political implications of memory and subject, the essay evaluates Kusano’s work as a critical practice within contemporary art history.

I. Replicated Faces, Fragmented Bodies — Genealogies of Asian Public Space and Religious Art

In Emi Kusano’s EGO In the Shell, what rises on CRTs and screens are minute fragments of the artist’s private photographs, reconstituted by AI. What is repeatedly summoned there are ritualistic and everyday public spaces specific to Asia—standardized gestures in wedding halls, the stillness and processions of funerals, the orderly queues and tacit discipline of commuter trains. These are sediments of disciplined bodily conduct deeply rooted in the postwar Japanese lifeworld, and at the same time they have built up the very cultural substrate.

It is no accident that Kusano repeatedly calls back this “vernacular memory.” Many generative AIs are tilted toward Euro-American datasets and, by re-enacting standardized global scenes as if they were universal, end up abstracting away regional textures and the concreteness of lived sensation. Kusano locates the point of critique precisely at the edge of that oblivion. She deliberately runs through generation the anti-modern, indigenous reverberations that Euro-American AI leaves behind and throws them back at the viewer.

What emerges here is a figure of the subject generated by the cultural ground of Japan/Asia, one that differs from Euro-American individualism. In Japan, through the repetition of disciplined gestures, the individual is incorporated into an aesthetics of “reading the air” and of adaptation to the group. The subject “I” is understood not as an isolated substance but as a generative knot of relations that appears each time within interdependence with others and the environment—an understanding that overlaps with the Buddhist idea of pratītya-samutpāda (dependent origination), opening a perspective that reconceives the subject not as “that which maintains consistency” but as “that which is generated in immediacy.”

This image of the “instantaneously generated subject” also underlies Asian religious representations of the body. For example, within the lineage of the fourteenth-century Tibetan Buddhist master Tsongkhapa, the body was conceived less as a physically fixed entity than as something like qi, faintly suffusing the environment like mist. The sculptural format characteristic of the Standing Statue of the Monk Hōshi (eighth century, Kyoto National Museum)—a single face splitting left and right so that another face appears from below—signals an Asian movement of spirit in which another self splits, replicates, and layers itself beyond the unified contour of the self. The multi-faced, multi-armed corporeality of traditional Buddhist sculpture—such as the Ashura and the Thousand-Armed Kannon—likewise visualizes the cohabitation of inner conflicts and multiple gazes, loosens the unicity of the subject, and has brought to the surface the multiplicity latent within a single existence.

The “replicated faces” and “splitting bodies” that recur throughout Kusano’s series are not mere futurist cyborg imagery; they are a contemporary variation on this Asian theory of the body. (This iconographic lineage is shared with the cyborg representations of Korea’s Lee Bul and Hong Kong’s Lu Yang.) In other words, EGO In the Shell inherits the traditional Asian religious view of the body while expanding it toward the vision of the “networked subject” depicted in Ghost in the Shell. The repetition of replicated faces and split bodies re-enacts, within today’s technological environment, the “multifacetedness,” “divisibility,” and “relational body” long pictured by Asian cultures, and it foreshadows a future self-image at the horizon of AI and biotechnology where the boundary between machine and subject has melted away.

II. Asian Technofeminism — The Face, Skin, and Cyborg as Ornament

To read Emi Kusano’s work within the context of AI and cyborgian bodies is tantamount to rethinking the relationship between technology and gender from an Asian perspective. This section first refers to the genealogy of cyberfeminism developed since the 1980s and, on that basis, discusses the present work as its development within Asia. In particular, Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) was groundbreaking in introducing the figure of the cyborg as a conceptual device for feminism to overcome binary oppositions such as “nature/culture,” “body/machine,” and “male/female.” For Haraway, the cyborg is a being without a mother, one that rejects origin myths. It is not a “biologically given body,” but a “body generated within social and technical networks.” From this perspective, Kusano’s act of repeatedly generating and re-performing her own face and body through AI can be seen as a contemporary reinterpretation of Haraway’s “body without origin.” The faces that AI produces for her are not biological bodies but “another skin” rewritten by social and technical code, and they blur the ontological boundary that asks “who am I.” Rather than an indelible proof of identity, they constitute a “symbiotic skin” that changes with each generation and modulates the interface with others, wherein a new political agency resides.

This perspective of the “body as code” is further elaborated in British thinker Sadie Plant’s Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (1997). Plant traces the origin of the computer back to the Jacquard loom and revalues the hidden genealogy of “textile = code” brought forth by women weavers. For her, femininity has continued to dwell at the base of technology in the forms of “network,” “flow,” and “weave,” and weaving is inverted into the very origin of technical thinking that encodes information. Practices once deemed women’s labor—“weaving,” “embroidery,” “sewing,” “ornament”—are precisely the prototypes of information technology, the apparatuses that generate code; computer code was “feminine” from the start. In Kusano’s self-portraits, the replicated faces, the lustrous textures of skin, and the designs of prostheses and silhouettes visualize exactly this “body-as-textile-code.” This can be read as the reintroduction, within masculine discourses of technology, of “ornament = feminine code.” In short, for Kusano, AI is a “loom” for reclaiming repressed feminine code.

Within this cyberfeminist context, Paraguayan-American artist Faith Wilding, in “Where is the Feminism in Cyberfeminism?” (2006), criticized excessive techno-optimism and stated that “what feminism seeks is the reprogramming of technology as an apparatus of domination.” From this viewpoint, Kusano’s practice does not destroy AI; rather, by introducing personal “noise” and Asia’s non-rational “spirituality” into AI, she reprograms technology from within. This is also an Asian mutant of the strategy proclaimed by the Australian collective VNS Matrix in their “Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century” (1991): “we are the virus of cyberspace, women who infect the machine.”

Pushing one step further into Kusano’s technofeminism from the vantage point of gender racialized as “yellow,” the lens of Anne Anlin Cheng’s Ornamentalism (2019), Professor at Princeton University, becomes necessary. As Cheng argues, in Euro-American modern and contemporary societies the bodies of Asian women have been permitted to exist as “ornament”—that is, as “visible beings” reduced to an exterior surface that lacks interiority. Yet Cheng rereads this “ornamentality” not merely as oppression but as a skin of survival. For women racialized as yellow, dressing up and being seen became a technique to manipulate and control the gaze of power in order to live on. Kusano’s AI self-portraits enact precisely this “re-armoring of ornament.” Her face no longer simply submits to modern norms of beauty. Motifs such as aging, prosthetics, splitting, and doubling destroy the faith in a “perfect surface” and form a third skin functionally expanded by technology. Each reverses the regime of the “visible body,” transforming a being that could only survive by being seen into one that perturbs the seer.

Kusano’s replicated faces and bodies are no longer “a single I.” They have the aspect of a “we,” generated together with AI, splitting, and mingling with others’ data. Moreover, actively training AI on her own face, past private memories, and Asian values is not submission to a dominant technology; it is a critical mimicry that infects and disrupts the structure itself. This body that is one yet multifaceted is an aesthetics of translucency, ambiguity, and invisibility pervasive in Asian traditions, while also translating philosopher Judith Butler’s “politics of iteration” into the algorithmic age. It is an aesthetics of “depthless depth,” mirror-like reflectivity that substitutes for interiority and depth; and it goes beyond Donna Haraway’s “ethics of connection” toward an “ethics of surface”—an Asian interface of skin, ornament, and replication. In Emi Kusano’s work, the face and body are no longer representations of interiority; they function as mirror-like surfaces that return the gaze of social and technical power—political ornaments of technofeminism. Yet this is also the quietest and most resilient form of resistance premised on the reality that Japanese society still preserves a severe structure of gender disparity: a mode of living-on “by being seen.”

III. As Cosmotechnics — Reading from Eastern Philosophy of Technology

The Hong Kong philosopher Yuk Hui, currently Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Erasmus University, 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 cracks the homogeneous futures promised by contemporary AI and biotechnology, and becomes a key to opening the possibility of plural “cosmotechnics” attuned to cultural contexts. Emi Kusano’s practice poetically embodies precisely this plural view of technology. For her, AI is not a tool for storing memory as data but a medium for generating and transforming relations themselves. AI does not function as a medium that fixes records; it operates as a device that visualizes the rhythms of relations that are continually being generated. Put differently, Kusano’s endeavor is not “to import AI as a universal technology,” but “to return AI to the context of an Asian cosmology.”

From this vantage point, what merits attention are the themes that run through her work: “no-self” and “multiple selves” arrived at at the far edge of technology. To borrow from Hui’s discussion, these become occasions to question the Western premise that the “individual” is the absolute unit. The subject is not an isolated point but is generated within a mesh of interdependent relations—the movements of AI within Kusano’s work act as a poetic circuit that concretizes this generative relational process.

What EGO In the Shell depicts is not only a new self-image concerning the plasticity of memory and the body. It is an artistic instance of what Hui calls a “new cosmotechnics,” a critical practice that relativizes the universality of technology and proposes alternative futures rooted in Asian cosmologies. Kusano’s AI calls ethics back into computation and summons into the flow of rational algorithms the non-rational cultures rooted in Asian religions. There, technology is no longer a cold mechanism but a supple Jacquard textile weaving together cosmos and human, memory and body, past and future—Kusano’s AI practice is precisely an attempt to poetically reconstruct such a “technology that harbors Asian relationality.”

IV. The Ethics of “Synthesized Memory” — A Rereading through 1990s Japanese SF Anime

Mamoru Oshii’s science-fiction film Ghost in the Shell (1995) takes as one of its central themes the way memory is treated as plastic data in a cyborgized society. In the emblematic vignette that inspired Kusano’s installation—the episode commonly known as “the garbage truck man”—a man learns during interrogation that memories of a fictitious wife and child have been implanted and that the very motives for his actions have been rewritten by another. Through that scene, the audience confronts a chilling and profound thesis: What is an “individual life,” and to what extent can the freedom to choose “to live” be controlled from outside?

The narrative of Ghost in the Shell dismantles the modern premise of “memory = a possession to be preserved.” Here, memory is no longer a stable personal asset; under the hand of the super-AI called the “Puppet Master,” it transforms into a fluid record that is incessantly replicated, falsified, and synthesized. In the finale, when the protagonist Motoko Kusanagi chooses fusion with the Puppet Master, it is not mere assimilation. Their memories intermix, and the germ of a new collective memory begins—“I” emerges not as the owner of memory but as the very medium that facilitates its synthesis.

This ethical turn resonates deeply with the interrogation installation in Emi Kusano’s EGO In the Shell. At the juncture where AI generates memory, the past is no longer an object to be judged for “truth or falsity.” What determines meaning rises instead as a “problem of protocol”: on which network, with whom, and under what conditions was it synthesized? The vast data handled by generative AI is an accumulation of simulacra—originals repeatedly copied, fused with other information, and altered. In that milieu, the criterion of “true or not” is nullified; what is asked instead are provenance, algorithmic conditions, and the authority and responsibility for modification. To visualize this problem, Kusano incorporates her own private photographs as a dataset and thrusts before the viewer the process by which AI, mimicking “authenticity,” melts memory.

Contemporary Japanese SF anime Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) likewise disrupted the very grounds of memory and subjectivity. In its endgame, human bodies are reduced to a liquid called LCL, and a vision unfolds of all humanity dissolving into a single sea. Memory here is presented not as an individual possession but as a sea of collective consciousness that mutually permeates and drifts. This utopian/dystopian configuration resonates with the contemporary scene in which AI generates averaged memory-images out of vast collective data. Dissolving the individual and returning to an undifferentiated totality may ease loneliness. Yet at the same time it risks erasing, as noise, the differences—wounds and deviations—that make each person who they are. In the final movement of Evangelion, when the protagonist Shinji Ikari chooses “re-embodiment,” it is an allegory that acknowledges the allure of dissolving into others and yet decides to stand as “I,” bearing solitude and pain.

Kusano’s work embodies this ethical tension. The memories produced by AI melt into the surges of aggregated data and appear as ambiguous images of memory that belong to no one. Yet by summoning intensely personal, once-forgotten snapshots and the Japanese/Asian vernacular of rites and public spaces, Kusano resists the current of homogenization and partially re-surfaces the “individual.” Her “synthesized personal memories” are not merely the pleasure of new imagery. They sharply pose the right to raise singularity again—in other words, the institutional design problem of who composes memory, how, and by what means it is to be carried into the future.

IV–I. No Ghost Just a Shell: Recontextualizing Emptiness

In parallel with 1990s Japanese SF anime, a project in the field of contemporary art that visualized this problem under the influence of Ghost in the Shell was No Ghost Just a Shell (1999–2003) by the French artists Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno. They purchased the character “Annlee” from a Japanese animation company and opened it up to multiple artists, making visible both the structure of an animation industry that consumes fictions and the circulation of a character without a subject. Annlee possessed no single, inherent story and existed on the market merely as a “vessel to be used”; yet by turning that emptiness to advantage and allowing multiple artists to ascribe meanings, Annlee at times came to be granted a portion of rights equal to those of a real human being. Brought into focus here are (1) the separation of bodily representation and narrative, (2) the generation of memory through a network of multiple authors, and (3) the process by which a single image differentiates as it traverses multiple nations and cultures. What contemporary AI learns is likewise a multinational, fragmented simulacrum, and in that the memory-images it generates are ambiguous fragments lacking points of reference, Annlee anticipated the present situation.

Kusano’s work inherits this “emptiness,” yet develops it otherwise. The core of its criticality lies instead in the very loss of substance that accompanies the hypertrophy of the subject produced when AI “excessively and continually alters facts and memories.” In Kusano, “emptiness” becomes a mirror reflecting a problem more pervasive than in the 1990s: a present saturated with fictions that are indistinguishable from reality.

Conclusion — Art in the Era of Synthesized Memory

Emi Kusano’s EGO In the Shell series is a practice that reexamines from the ground up the meanings of memory, subject, and history in an era when AI technologies generate “non-existent memories.” Her work does not remain at the level of mere technical experiment or the replaying of futuristic visions; while rearranging cultural and philosophical foundations, it engages the ethics of “synthesized memory” and the core questions therein. What Kusano’s work indicates is a fundamental shift in the meanings of memory and history in the age of AI—from “authenticity” to “protocol.” In other words, memory does not faithfully preserve the past; its meaning is determined by procedures and governance—by which datasets, under what conditions, and by whom it is synthesized. Resisting the tendency of generative AI, in the name of global standards, to forget regional and cultural memories, this work practices cultural critique by recursively generating vernacular public spaces and bodily comportments, asking “what kinds of memory ought to be left to the future.” Equally important is the ethical task it poses: that these “protocols of synthesis” must not be absorbed into a single totality but institutionalized as a right to be archived and recomposed otherwise, while retaining cultural difference and deviation.

Read through feminism, the work also marks a new intersection of technology and gender in Asia. The “alliance between machines and women” since the 1980s began as a mode of thought that transcended Western binaries, but in Asia it has taken a new turn by conjoining with local aesthetics such as ornament, spirituality, and bodily memory. Just as Korea’s Lee Bul critically sculpted representations of women’s bodies in relation to post–Cold War state power, Kusano likewise reconstructs de-modernly, working with AI and the data of Japan’s collective postwar memory. As we have seen, EGO In the Shell inherits traditional Asian theories of form and the body while bridging the questions of memory and gender opened by 1990s Japanese SF anime and contemporary art toward a new ethical horizon in the AI era. To repeat: the past and history are no longer repositories of facts; they are boundaries where, within protocols of synthesis, they are constantly updated and where anonymity and proper names contest one another. Kusano’s work stands at the forefront of a transformation that might be called the art of the age of synthesized memory, opening before us as a prophecy that anticipates the philosophical and aesthetic tasks of our time.