Podcast

The Cicada Does Not Know Summer [Podcast]

An arcade cabinet in Tokyo writes a stranger's life from census data, and the artist who built it explains why you are allowed to go back exactly once.

Jamin Warren

Jamin Warren

— 2 min read
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The Cicada Does Not Know Summer [Podcast]

I ask Tomo Kihara what a machine cannot recognize, and get three very different answers.

We start with Street Debater, the project he built at TU Delft: a balance scale handed to people asking for money in London and Amsterdam, where passersby vote with coins on a question instead of giving alms. One man in London earned enough from it to get off the streets. Then A Game of Possible Lives, the arcade cabinet at Roppongi Crossing 2025 that runs a language model locally and narrates the life of a statistically plausible person assembled from Japan's census. Nothing in it is scripted, which Tomo calls the scary part, and you are allowed to go back exactly once. He built the cabinet to resemble a gravestone.

Then Deviation Game, made with Playfool, where you draw a prompt so a human can read it and an image model cannot. In 2024 a few whiskers were enough to beat the machine. Now Japanese players draw the novelist Natsume Soseki, author of I Am a Cat, and hope the model does not make the connection. We talk about what that has in common with the way people write around a censor, and whether learning to be legible to each other and illegible to a model is a literacy worth having.

Tomo also makes the case that a small model running on a laptop should not be argued about as though it were a data center, having benchmarked his own game against a graphically demanding PC title and found it drew less power. And he tells me he has come to terms with not sitting comfortably in one chair, by way of a Buddhist saying about a cicada that cannot know what summer is.

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Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by Nick Sylvester.

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