Emi Kusano
Echo Chamber of Care, 2026
AI Photography
Set against the backdrop of an attention economy flooded with AI-generated content, this photographic series explores the polysemy of the word "model." The countless figures crowding these images, clad in standardiSed uniforms, offer smiles and attentive care. They embody the societal "role models" historically expected of women, while simultaneously acting as the literal "AI models" (training data) driving the system. In creating this work, Kusano built a custom AI model trained on her own face and body. The process of converting herself into data and directing her generated clones to perform endless labor embodies a contemporary reality: one where cuteness and attentiveness are stripped of personal identity, becoming mass-producible specifications.
In Japanese subculture, "transformation" has long been an ambivalent act - simultaneously a symbol of empowerment for girls and an object of sexual consumption by the gaze of others. In this work, that act is coldly updated. It is no longer a magical miracle, but a harsh survival strategy: optimising oneself into an "ornament" evaluated by algorithms and public metrics simply to survive the system. This work confronts not a distant sci-fi future where AI replaces humans, but the reality of our present. It asks what "models" we are already learning and reproducing with our own bodies in our daily lives. Through overwhelming multiplicity, Kusano visualises the distortion of a society that consumes humans as vessels for data, sharply updating the art-historical discourse on the body and reproduction for the age of AI.
In Japanese subculture, "transformation" has long been an ambivalent act - simultaneously a symbol of empowerment for girls and an object of sexual consumption by the gaze of others. In this work, that act is coldly updated. It is no longer a magical miracle, but a harsh survival strategy: optimising oneself into an "ornament" evaluated by algorithms and public metrics simply to survive the system. This work confronts not a distant sci-fi future where AI replaces humans, but the reality of our present. It asks what "models" we are already learning and reproducing with our own bodies in our daily lives. Through overwhelming multiplicity, Kusano visualises the distortion of a society that consumes humans as vessels for data, sharply updating the art-historical discourse on the body and reproduction for the age of AI.
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