Emi Kusano’s “EGO in the Shell”

My (Pre/Re/Inter)view with the artist.

In Ghost in the Shell, the timeless question “What guarantees that I remain myself?” echoes through decades of cyberpunk philosophy, from Masamune Shirow’s 1989 manga to Mamoru Oshii’s haunting film adaptations. The story of Major Motoko Kusanagi — a cyborg whose only organic part is her brain — becomes a parable of our own age of AI, memory manipulation, and identity flux. As brain-computer interfaces blur the line between human and machine, the “ghost” becomes not only a metaphor for consciousness but for the fragile continuity of self in an age of synthetic perception and memory reconsolidation.

In this continuum of thought, multimedia artist Emi Kusano carries the torch into the 21st century. Her series EGO in the Shell: Ghost Interrogation reinterpret the Ghost in the Shell universe through a Buddhist and posthuman lens — where nostalgia, memory, and synthetic imagery merge into a new kind of visual consciousness. By training AI on her own photos, Kusano reconstructs her identity through “memories of things that never existed,” turning personal archives into a generative meditation on authenticity and the fluidity of self.

As curator Yohsuke Takahashi observes, Kusano’s work embodies Asia’s pluralist spirit, where identity is not defined but continuously rewritten — a philosophy echoing Vilém Flusser’s vision of a world where “true” and “false” are just horizons. In her upcoming exhibition at the Offline Gallery, New York, Kusano transforms these ideas into an immersive environment of CRT screens, AI images, and holographic self-dialogue — a living “ghost interrogation” about who we are in the age of generative memory.

Read my essay and interview with Emi Kusano in The AI Art Magazine.