Neil Mendoza’s practice has always sat at the intersection of sculpture, software, and engineering, usually with a streak of dark humor about how mediated our relationship to objects and each other has become. Synthetic Spirits, his newest work, takes that practice somewhere quieter and more specific: a historic sake store at Japan’s Setouchi Triennale, reimagined as a place where discarded objects reveal the spirits Japanese folklore says they’ve earned.
Watch: Neil Mendoza — The Robotic Voice Activated Word Kicking Machine (SIGGRAPH) (YouTube)
What the piece actually does
Tsukumogami, in Japanese folklore, are everyday objects that acquire spirits after long enough existence — a belief system built around respecting the things you’ve used for years rather than discarding them. Mendoza staged two kinetic installations around that idea: a sake bottle (inhabited by the spirit Kameosa) and a straw sandal (inhabited by Bakezōri), each mounted on motorized rigs that carry them past a screen in mechanical choreography. Every pass triggers a generative AI system to render the yokai spirit understood to live inside the object, visible for a moment before the object glides on and the screen goes quiet again.
Why the contrast is the point
The piece’s tension is explicit: a centuries-old belief that objects deserve reverence for their long use, staged using the newest and most disposable-feeling technology available — a generative model conjuring an image and discarding it a moment later. That’s not a coincidence. Mendoza’s practice has consistently used absurd, over-engineered mechanisms to investigate how people relate to objects and technology, and pairing folklore about permanence with a technology defined by instant, throwaway generation is a sharper version of that same question than a more straightforward AI-art piece would manage.
How it was actually built
The mechanical choreography runs on openFrameworks for real-time control, with Autodesk Fusion handling the CAD work behind the motorized rigs and a Qidi Plus 4 printer used for fabrication — a production stack built around physical engineering first, with the generative AI layer added on top rather than being the whole piece. That’s consistent with how Mendoza’s other kinetic work gets made, and it’s part of why the piece reads as a real mechanical object with software inside it, rather than a screen with a sculpture bolted to the front.