Guest: Emi Kusano (emikusano.art)
Series Hosts: Farrah Carbonell + Elena Zavelev
Moderator: Justin Gilanyi

We have always used images to construct versions of ourselves. Now those images can generate versions of us.

Tokyo-based artist Emi Kusano works at the increasingly unstable boundary between memory, identity, and technology. Drawing on Japanese pop culture, nostalgia, and imagined futures, she uses photography, video, installation, and generative AI to examine how the images around us shape who we become.

Her own likeness has become part of that inquiry. By training AI on her facial data, Kusano turns the self into both subject and material, opening larger questions around authorship, representation, and what remains uniquely ours when an image can continue without us.

At the center of the conversation is a deceptively simple question: When the self can be endlessly reproduced, what does it mean to remain yourself?