Lu Yang: DOKU the Self (2022) photo of installation
I'm not going to pretend that I know where any of this A.I. stuff is going, but a great place to find out where it's not going is the 53rd floor of the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, which just happens to be where the Mori Art Museum is located.
After popping my ears in the elevator on the way up, I was optimistically expecting some answers at the exhibition "MACHINE LOVE: Video Game, A.I. and Contemporary Art." Finally, I would find out what all this A.I. malarky was about, wouldn't I? Sadly, I left the show none the wiser. But I did notice a few things.
Firstly, I can see the appeal of shows like this -- involving video and digitally generated artworks -- to the Mori. This is just a much easier logistical (and insurance) sell than doing a show focusing on, say, Greco-Roman sculpture or giant baroque canvases, when you're on the 53rd floor!!!
Secondly, it was clear that, despite being a very international show, with intriguing contributions by Westerners and others, the whole "dehumanised A.I. vibe" is just something that East Asians living in giant, teeming, neon-splattered megacities instinctively get a lot better than those of us from small sleepy Western towns, like London, for example.
American artist/scholar Kate Crawford, who lives in some remote village called New York, was showing Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500 (2023). This was academically and graphically impressive, with a whole room covered in what looked like a giant crib chart on the science, politics, and economics of the last 500 years. But artistically it was cold, dry, and rather "blue stocking" -- to use a rather dated term for female academic try-hardism from around 200 years ago...
Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler: Calculating Empires - A Genealogy of Technology and Power, Since 1500 (2023) Installation view
Much more impactful was Japanese artist Ryotaro Sato's video work Outlet (2025) where various "assets" collected from the internet (3D models, textures, and animations used in video games) are given a virtual life in what becomes alternatively a nightmarish vision and clown world. Sato's art is suffused with a brutal sense of irony and black humour, although I am also open to the notion that this may be entirely accidental.
Also impressive was Shanghai artist Lu Yang's giant video installation "DOKU." This presents a world inspired by the Mahayana Buddhist phrase “Dokusho Dokushi” [we are born alone, and we die alone]), in which an avatar, who is the digital incarnation of the artist himself, journeys through various aspects of the Buddhist spiritual world. This too gets quite bleak at times, with oceans of tears and landscapes strewn with skeletons. The Zen garden and tinfoil encrusted walls that surround the giant screen, however, set it off very nicely!
But perhaps the punchiest contribution is Korean artist Kim Ayoung's Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (2022), yet another video installation work with a few 3D embellishments. This seemed to capture the essence of the the futuristic gig economy that comes about when technology finds a way to efficiently plug humans into the economic matrix.
Kim's work tells the story of female delivery riders forced into increasingly efficient and dehumanising service by the performance algorithms and their need to maintain a positive rating. Man, that's just like me whenever I make a sell on e-Bay!
Like I said, I learnt little new here, but that may be because I have been interested in these tech, data, and AI issues for some time, at least since seeing the exhibition "Futurism and the Fab Mind" at Roppongi’s 21_21 Design Site back in 2014. But this is certainly a show for those of us wanting to at least ponder the possible directions this A.I. thing is taking us in.
Exhibition details
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