Collaborating with AI in an Endless Pursuit: What Eight Years of a “Lavish Laboratory” Left Behind

No.11( Commission )

#Creative Direction

2026

Collaborating with AI in an Endless Pursuit: What Eight Years of a “Lavish Laboratory” Left Behind

Yoichi Ochiai x Japan Philharmonic Orchestra Project <Part 2>

Part 1 explored how WOW found its place within orchestral tradition as a “Video Performer” and, after an extensive period of research and immersion, achieved synchronization with living music. Part 2 turns to the project’s later years, including its turning point with Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, and the shift toward AI. It examines what this “lavish laboratory for technology and expression” left behind for WOW as an organization.

Collaborating with AI in an Endless Pursuit: What Eight Years of a “Lavish Laboratory” Left Behind

Mission: To reexamine the form of orchestral performance, which has remained unchanged for 300 years, and to use technology to update the concert experience. To make visuals function not as a mere backdrop, but as part of the orchestra itself.
Approach: WOW took part in the project as a “Video Performer” and pioneered new methods of expression each year. These ranged from understanding the music, to intervening in the space through hardware, to synchronizing with live performance, and finally to exploring autonomous expression through generative AI. Treating the work as a cultural project in which tradition and technology converge, WOW spent eight years continually taking on the challenge of creating new concert experiences.

The Expo and AI

Chapter.1

As the project entered its second half, its ambitious approach to both expression and technology accelerated even further. The biggest turning point came when Yoichi Ochiai was appointed producer of a Signature Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai. Until then, each year’s work had been a stand-alone event, focused on how to make that year’s concert as compelling as possible. With the major goal of presenting the concert as a signature event of the Expo, the project grew into a “lavish stage” that looked several years ahead and explored new forms of expression using AI (artificial intelligence). Guided by Ochiai’s vision of “Digital Nature,” which dissolves the boundary between the digital and the analog, the team carried out one hands-on, trial-and-error experiment after another in “Recursive Orchestra” (2023) and “Alternation of Orchestra” (2024). These experiments trained AI on the orchestra’s acoustic data and historical context to generate visuals in real time.

In “Recursive Orchestra” (2023), the team extracted what might be called the “genes” of music from individual performance data and used them to generate organic visual patterns. In “Alternation of Orchestra” (2024), AI was trained on program notes left behind by the composers and generated visuals that were projected to transform the entire space of Suntory Hall. Through such efforts, the team further expanded the possibilities of AI and expression.

Grappling With the Pandemic, Running Alongside AI

Chapter.2

Amid the constant adoption of new technologies, there were moments when the team found itself under extreme pressure on site. One such moment was “Un-Synchronized Orchestra,” held in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Because the audience at the concert hall had to be limited more strictly than ever before, the team introduced spatial effects using AR (augmented reality) for online viewers. At the time, there was little established know-how for live-streaming AR footage in which digital light and effects overlaid a live performance in a quiet hall in real time. Combined with handling high-resolution audio at the highest industry standard, this left the WOW team feeling its way in the dark. Even the rehearsals rarely went smoothly, and success ultimately came only in the live performance itself, with no successful run-through beforehand. It was a truly extreme situation on site.

As the shift toward AI progressed, WOW’s ideal form of performance was one that did not rely on manual switching, but in which “AI autonomously generates visuals and fully synchronizes with the orchestra’s living tempo and subtle fluctuations.” AI had already been used in the 2023 and 2024 concerts. However, it was not until “The Orchestra of null²” in 2025, the Expo year, that the team was finally able to align AI organically with the real-time tempo of the live performance. “By working patiently on production and experiments while keeping pace with the evolution of AI, our team built up knowledge of what AI can and cannot do. Our ideals for technology and expression finally came together, and we were able to show through performance how video can exist as a kind of instrument,” says Kondo.

That does not mean, however, that everything could simply be left to AI. Even with AI in hand as a new “brush” for expression, the human artistry of the performer remained indispensable to the very end: the ability to sense the breath of the living music on site and to stay finely attuned to the conductor and the musicians. In “The Orchestra of null²,” AI analyzed in real time the bodily movements of Noh and Kyogen, traditional Japanese performing arts. Through a massive video installation on stage, the orchestra and the visuals responded to each other like reflections on the surface of water, bringing the project to its culmination in a truly unprecedented form of expression.

An Endless Pursuit, Uncompromising to the Very Limit

Chapter.3

No account of this project would be complete without the intense passion brought by Yoichi Ochiai, a creator of rare talent. “He never allows compromise, not from himself and not from anyone he works with. Efficiency and predictability simply don’t exist for him. Right up until the concert, and sometimes even during it, he keeps thinking about how to make things better and asks us to rebuild,” recalls Kondo, who spent more time with Ochiai than anyone else at WOW. It was the polar opposite of typical client work that proceeds according to fixed specifications: an unending cycle of hypothesis, testing and reconstruction.

What the “Lavish Laboratory” Left Behind for WOW

Chapter.4

Such a long and demanding production process, one that pushed expression to its limits, left a lasting legacy within WOW as an organization. Oho, who oversees resources across the entire company, explains: “For example, one of our programmers who worked on the Expo pavilion later kept pushing to the limit on another large-scale exhibition project, relentlessly pursuing quality. He told me, ‘After going through that down-to-the-wire production process with Ochiai, this didn’t faze me at all.’ The tough spirit and stamina to never give up and to keep pursuing the limits of expression to the very end are being passed down within the WOW team. That, more than anything, is our legacy.” For eight years, WOW saw this project through with one of Japan’s leading orchestras as a “cultural project” dedicated to exploring the depths of expression, even when doing so meant setting aside conventional business frameworks and profit. The knowledge of embodied digital expression gained through this unique collaboration, and the pride of creators who never give up, will surely continue to resonate powerfully at the foundation of every spatial production and visual design WOW creates.

Credit

Organizer : Japan Philharmonic Orchestra Director : Yoichi Ochiai Conductor : Hikaru Ebihara, Junichi Hirokami Light : Kazuhiro Naruse Creative Director : Kosuke Oho Director : Tatsuki Kondo Planner : Shigetaka Makabe Technical Director : Shunsaku Ishinabe, Sunataro Hosoi, Yuta Nakano, Keita Abe, Kensuke Arakawa Programmer : Yuta Nakano, Keita Abe, Seiya Takasawa, Sunataro Hosoi, Shunsaku Ishinabe, Takeshi Funatsu, Takuto Nanba, Ryonosuke Ono Visual Designer : Hironobu Sone, Takafumi Matsunaga, Tomoko Ishii, Moe Goto, Reiko Katayama, Shota Oga, Rin Matsunaga, Misaki Horai Designer : Haruka Kanno PR : Michiru Sasaki, Shione Hamada Project Manager : Ken Ishii Assistant Producer : Ryoma Yamashita, Taiki Koizumi Producer : Go Hagiwara Camera Crew : Imura Office Photographer : Atsushi Yamaguchi, Taira Tairadate, Tomoko Hidaki Equipment Cooperation : Prism, Astro Design, TELMIC Cooperation : jiseCHI, inc., raw, TBWA\HAKUHODO, Suntory Hall, Pixie Dust Technologies, Inc., FUJITSU LIMITED, GROOVE X Co., Ltd., Pioneer Corporation, Asahi Shuzo Co., Ltd., Emohouse, Seibido Co., Ltd., Tokamachi City Museum, Ritsumeikan University Shizuka Shirakawa Institute of Oriental Letters and Culture, Haruka International Co., Ltd., yuki tsuji, and others. Grant : Reiwa 3rd year “Japan Expo” Innovation Project, Agency for Cultural , Affairs/Japan Arts Council, Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture Arts Council Tokyo