Volkan Eke

What business game characters have appearing materially in the shrines of Shinto deities known as kami? This is an ethnographic fieldwork at Shinto shrines and Artificial Intelligence (AI) development labs in Japan to tease out the affinity between religious spirits and virtual game characters. In their affective commitments to actualize virtual game characters, humans replicate material practices (making wishmaking charms, curating Shrine museum galleries etc.) traditionally reserved for ancient Shinto kami. Since depictions of kami has historically been the privilege of modern political authorities and Japan’s own ethnographies of folktale studies, this affinity raises questions about exactly what kind of entities can be thought by coding AI-controlled virtual but spiritual entities.