Enlightenment for Sale™

Emi Kusano’s Enlightenment for Sale™ (2025) is a three‑channel video suite that time‑travels through the neon optimism of 1980s Japanese television commercials in order to scrutinise today’s algorithmic culture. Kusano fabricates a trio of speculative products—SmartSkin™, AutoSpeech™, and MindVPN®—each promising friction‑free upgrades to body, speech, and mind. Their adverts mimic the over‑saturated palette and manic jingle logic of the bubble‑era, but the technologies on offer belong unmistakably to our own horizon of AI dermatology, voice synthesis, and cloud‑based affect management.

​

The work borrows three classical Buddhist notions—impermanence, non‑self, and the inevitability of suffering—not as devotional claims but as diagnostic tools. By aligning them with contemporary obsessions—perfect skin, risk‑free communication, on‑demand serenity—Kusano exposes how late‑capitalist innovation repackages existential unease as endless micro‑transactions. What was once an ethical inquiry becomes a service tier.

​

The museum visitor is caught between retro spectacle and present anxiety. The rhetoric of the commercials insists that every glitch—wrinkle, slip of the tongue, mood swing—can be patched in real time. Yet the more seamless the interface, the more visible the underlying code of control: biometric tracking, predictive feedback loops, data extraction disguised as self‑care. Kusano’s pastiche therefore operates less as nostalgia and more as a split‑screen critique, staging the fake certainty of yesterday’s future against the precarious upgrade cycles of today.

​

Enlightenment for Sale™ ultimately asks whether a culture that monetises impermanence, outsources speech, and cloud‑streams consciousness can still claim any distance from the conditions it seeks to escape. The answer, left deliberately open, hovers in the dissonance between fluorescent promise and lingering discomfort.