The End of Nostalgia: When AI Begins to Manufacture Memory

Artist Emi Kusano began by photographing Harajuku street culture as a teenager. Today, she uses generative AI to revisit cultures, identities, and social worlds that were never fully recorded. Drawing on projects that explore Japanese street culture, women’s lives and labour, and bodies shaped by the machine’s gaze, she reveals how archives, model behaviour, prompts, and human choices create synthetic memory. The talk asks what happens when AI no longer simply recalls the past, but begins to manufacture it.