In their first collaboration, Japanese artists Yuko Kaseki, Mieko Suzuki, and Bidou Yamaguchi present NO-MEN 能面, an audiovisual performance interrogating the mirror world of AI’s digital doubles through the centuries-old tradition of Noh theatre.

Noh theatre is an ancient tradition in which performers embody different emotional and spiritual states. These are conveyed through masks, whose expressions shift according to different lighting and angles, as well as minor gestures. In Shintō tradition, Noh masks, like all objects, are believed to carry a soul. Receiving this soul requires a complex ritual involving a confrontation with—and emptying of—the self in a mirror room. Interrogating the digital double as a mirror which, rather than making it porous, imprisons the self, the artists turn to Noh as a conceptual tool to ask: can something enter that which has no inside? A question of interiority that posits whether the soul rests in both the body and machine. In Noh, the body is a vessel that is deliberately emptied as a spiritual technique. AI’s digital double has no inside according to an entirely different logic: the twin is not emptied but never filled, constituted entirely of surface, of sediment. How has something hollow become such a central emotional companion?

Both Noh and AI are called upon as interfaces, as an invocation of something that isn’t quite there. Within this framework, dancer and choreographer Yuko Kaseki insists on the body’s presence, while questioning its ego, acknowledging that under spiritual weight, it can tremble and fall. Meanwhile, the machine soldiers on, as history without memory, as answers without longing. Chatbots may speak of grief without having been carved of it. Noh masks, by contrast, are carved to embody the spiritual and emotional worlds of their makers and their community. Is the move towards chatbots and avatars—towards desireless perseverance—liberation or impoverishment?

Choreography | Performance Yuko Kaseki
Noh Masks Bidou Yamaguchi
Composition | Sound Mieko Suzuki

Commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)