Emi Kusano: Ego in the Shell

Emi Kusano has emerged as a defining figure in Japan’s digital art landscape. Known for experimenting with generative AI long before it became mainstream, her work has been shown internationally by renowned institutions such as the V&A, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, and the FIT Museum in New York. Kusano merges technological processes with Japanese cultural sensibilities, creating a distinctive language that places her at the centre of contemporary conversations around art and technology.

In Ego in the Shell: Ghost Interrogation, Kusano turns her gaze inward to the intimate terrain of memory and selfhood. She uses AI to reconstruct fragments of her personal history, layering human recollection with machine interpretation to explore how identity can both dissolve and reform. As Kusano explains, “By combining AI reconstructions with fragments of my past, I want to create a ritual where audiences confront both the permanence and impermanence of being.” This notion of ritual is crucial. It speaks to how digital technologies create mutable architectures of selfhood, where memory is endlessly archived, duplicated and reanimated but rarely fixed, which is in ways repetitive, sacred, and ritualistic.

A key work in the exhibition is Ghost Interrogation, a sculptural installation of stacked CRT monitors arranged in a mandala-like formation. The work recalls Nam June Paik’s radical investigations into television as both sculptural medium and philosophical threshold, where the glowing surface is less a screen than a site of encounter. Echoes of TV Buddha (1974) and Video Wall resonate throughout Kusano’s approach, and there is a quiet kinship with Paik’s TV Candle (2002), where a single candle flickers inside the hollow frame of a television. In that gesture, Paik transformed a banal machine into an object of contemplation, replacing the image with a flame and collapsing technology and spirituality into a shared register of impermanence. 

Paik’s practice was profoundly shaped by his Korean heritage and his lifelong engagement with Zen Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoist notions of flux and emptiness. Unlike the techno-utopianism of many Western media artists of his time, Paik understood technology as entangled with cultural cosmology and Eastern philosophy. The television set, for him, was not merely a device but a modern shrine: a vessel capable of holding both information and contemplation. Kusano extends this lineage into the algorithmic present. The warm flame of Paik’s candle gives way to the unstable glow of AI-generated memory. Where Paik revealed the ephemerality of the image through light and signal, Kusano confronts the instability of identity itself, constructing a feedback loop in which personal history and algorithmic reconstruction continuously rewrite one another. She treats the screen as a living interlocutor, a space where subjectivity, technology and ritual converge. Representing how online identities can splinter and multiply, existing in many states at once. Kusano’s installation makes this fluidity visible: the AI functions less as a neutral tool than as a co-author of subjectivity, shaping how memory is experienced rather than merely recording it.

A holographic Kusano appears in dual roles as both interrogator and subject, while surveillance cameras implicate the viewer, enfolding them in a shared system of mediated perception. If Paik used television to hold a flame, Kusano uses it to hold a mirror, reflecting a self that no longer belongs entirely to the human.

The AI reconstructions that populate her monitors are not neutral images of the past but active agents in shaping how the past is remembered and felt. As Hito Steyerl writes, “Images do not represent reality; they produce it.” Kusano’s installation embodies this condition with striking clarity. Steyerl argues that images today circulate as operational forces, not passive reflections. Ghost Interrogation stages this dynamic in the most personal of arenas: the private archive. Here, what was once a vessel of memory becomes an engine of self-fashioning. This is where Kusano’s dialogue with Paik becomes particularly resonant. Paik revealed how media could be both contemplative and performative. Kusano extends this into the algorithmic age, showing how contemporary image systems not only frame experience but actively compose the conditions of selfhood. The CRT monitors in Ghost Interrogation do not display static memories, they circulate subjectivity. The work does not simply depict instability but performs it.

The installation also gestures toward a future in which memory may be co-authored by machines. The AI does not merely replicate the past but fabricates new narrative threads, inserting synthetic fragments into personal history. These artificial memories are neither entirely true nor fully false. By projecting them alongside archival traces, Kusano blurs the boundary between evidence and invention, transforming memory into an unstable terrain of meaning-making.

“In today’s world, the boundaries that once defined the self between mind and body, past and future, organic and synthetic are dissolving. Ghost in the Shell foresaw this unraveling decades ago,” states Offline director and curator, Mika Bar-On Nesher. Guest curator Yohsuke Takahashi adds: “In Kusano’s work, we encounter memories that never existed, yet feel faintly familiar. Even as we recognise them as fabrications, they confront us with an uncanny sense of nostalgia.”

Kusano’s exhibition ultimately moves beyond the familiar dialectic of human and machine, offering instead a vision in which identity, memory, and technology form a shared, unstable ecology. By staging personal history as something porous and co-authored, Ego in the Shell: Ghost Interrogation invites viewers to inhabit the threshold between image and subject, observer and observed. In this liminal space, the self is no longer a fixed centre but a flickering constellation, continually rewritten by the very systems that claim to capture it.