Amber & Ember. Meeting Hiroshi in Delft, Written Before CHI '26

Written before CHI'26

April in Delft. Invited by Cake Researcher Jie Li, I came to TU Delft to attend a lecture by MIT Media Lab Professor Hiroshi Ishii.

To be honest, before arriving, I was deep in an emotional rut. My paper had been rejected, I was endlessly revising it, and the reviewers' comments were pulling me back and forth. At a certain point in a PhD journey, one inevitably falls into a sense of nihilism. You start to wonder if the passion that initially drew you into this academic world is still there, and whether anyone actually cares about the things you are dedicating your life to studying.

Standing on stage, Hiroshi folded forty years of a highly energetic and passionate life into a single hour. It was so grand, yet so poetic.

After listening, I suddenly felt that the anxieties trapping me no longer mattered. I felt as if I were standing at the end of my life, looking back at myself in this current moment. In that instant, I thought: I, too, want to compose my life like this.

The Man Circling the Tower: A Vision Requires a Lifetime of Support

In 1997, at CHI Atlanta, he published his first paper from MIT. It was the famous Tangible Bits, which later became the most cited paper in CHI history.

During our dinner conversation, I couldn't help but ask him: "Did you know back then that it would become the most influential paper?"

He shook his head and said he didn't know. He just felt that through hard work, he needed to get others to accept it and foster a Community around it.

He drew an analogy:

A Vision is like a stool; you need three or even four legs to support it so that others can sit securely. You have to do an endless amount of work to support your Vision before people can truly understand it.

In his lecture, he brought up the allegory of the Tower of Babel: humanity was once scattered to the ends of the earth due to the confusion of tongues. But Hiroshi's tower does not reach toward God; it reaches toward the community's understanding.

Different disciplines speak completely different languages. All you can do is spend long years polishing diverse works and examples—they manifest alternately along the way, sometimes as Art, sometimes as Science, Design, or Technology. You are like a lonely wanderer, silently climbing upward, circling the Tower of Babel. One lap, then another, spiraling up.

You don't have to desperately wish for everyone to understand you instantly. It isn't until you reach a high enough point that others will finally realize: Oh, so that's what it is.

• Art — questions the world around us
• Science — explains the world around us
• Design — articulates the solution
• Technology — enables the solution

This is a form of ascetic practice. He mentioned a quote by Barabási in The Formula: "Success is a collective verdict." Personal success depends on the perception and recognition of others.

He founded the TEI conference (International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction), shepherding it from 2007 to 2026. One person spent twenty years solidifying a vision into a discipline and a community. This goes far beyond what a single Tangible Bits paper could bear. It is a resolute commitment, weaving one's life passion, inch by inch, into a community.

From musicBottles to SandScape, from inFORM to bioLogic—the countless works are like the annual rings of time. Every single piece is a brick embedded in the Tower of Babel. They are individual CHI papers or UIST demos. This is a scholar who, for thirty years, has repeatedly articulated his vision through his work, much like a master craftsman.

How do you form a community? Just like his analogies of the stool and the Tower of Babel, you have to do infinite work to support that vision and build the staircase leading to understanding.

Beginner's Mind: The Warmth of Fingertips and the Solitude of the White Bird

After the lecture that day, he went to visit Delft's design lab. I watched him listen incredibly earnestly to the young designers' explanations, running his fingers over every material.

This is someone who has studied tangibility for thirty years. Yet, he still uses a beginner's state of mind to understand and perceive.

In Zen Buddhism, there is the concept of "beginner's mind" (shoshin). In the eyes of a beginner, the world is full of branching paths and infinite possibilities; but in the eyes of an expert, few possibilities remain. Hiroshi has been doing this for forty years, yet when he walks into a lab—no matter how ordinary—he still listens attentively, like a child seeing yarn for the first time.

This almost instinctive curiosity is deeply moving. At academic conferences every year, from CHI to TEI, you can always find him. Wherever he is present, he is always the first to raise his hand to ask a question, and his questions always cut right to the core. You can see a pure passion within him.

However, the upward climb is destined to be bitterly cold. He presented Kachō Fūgetsu (Flower, Bird, Wind, Moon), accompanied by a poem by Bokusui Wakayama:

White bird, are you not sad? You drift, never dyed by the navy blue of the sea or the sky's blue.

Solitude. Unstained by the blue of the sky, and unstained by the blue of the sea. But the poet asks: Are you not sad?

The price of remaining unstained is not being easily accepted. His TeleAbsence project was rejected for two whole years. On one hand, there is the desire to maintain the purity and solitude of the white bird; on the other hand, one must spend twenty years waiting for a collective verdict. He was simultaneously enduring and fiercely believing in both of these things.

From TelePresence to TeleAbsence: Crossing Time

Hiroshi's research trajectory is an ascetic practice centered on "Presence": from Tangible Bits to Radical Atoms, from Crossing Space with TelePresence to Crossing Time with TeleAbsence.

And everything associated with time naturally carries a tension filled with sentimentality and helplessness.

He spoke of his late mother, and that long, enduring longing. "I want to always remember you. I want to always be remembered by you."

He yearns to find a way to carry the void left behind when someone departs. It is not about perfect replication, nor is it about digital simulation; it is purely about experiencing the existence of the absence itself.

On the slide appeared the shadows of Hiroshima in 1945. The flash of the nuclear explosion etched human silhouettes firmly onto the stone steps. The people vanished, but their shadows remained. This is the Presence of Absence. Humans turned into light, the light degraded into shadow, and the shadow was branded onto the stone.

The increase of entropy is the iron law of the universe. Everything is dissipating; even if we exhaust all our efforts to protect it, loss remains irreversible.

Therefore, we have the Buddhist concepts of "Form is emptiness" and "All things are impermanent," as well as the Japanese tea ceremony idioms "Ichi-go ichi-e" (One time, one meeting) and "Esha jōri" (Those who meet must part). Because the living must eventually perish, encounters become incredibly solemn.

Absence has never been nothing. An empty chair speaks volumes more than a fully occupied one; a stretch of silence comes far closer to the flesh and blood of longing than a perfectly restored audio recording. What Hiroshi wants to do is translate "emptiness" into "form," turning absence into a presence that can be felt by the fingertips.

"Ma" (間, ま) is a core concept of "space" and "time" in Japanese aesthetics, referring to the "gap," "void," or "pause" between things, objects, or moments. It is not simply a vacuum, but a "negative space" rich in energy, allowing light and life to breathe.

On-site, we listened quietly as his student, Xiao Xiao, played a duet of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence alongside the late Ryuichi Sakamoto through MirrorFugue. Although Sakamoto passed away in 2023, his fingers were still projected, rising and falling on the piano keys. The melody was deeply moving. And this Co-Presence, paradoxically, emphasized that "Absence," allowing it to be genuinely felt. This must be the aesthetics of TeleAbsence that Hiroshi strives for.

The Boundary Between Monster and Human

At CHI 2024 in Hawaii, during a workshop called "AI and Afterlife," I met Hiroshi for the first time.

The topic at hand was: Even though a person dies, they leave behind a massive amount of digital records on Facebook and the internet. People were debating: When AI can easily synthesize a person to "resurrect" the deceased, is this ultimately comforting the living, or creating monsters for entertainment? We discussed a case study: "Let Mom Hug You Properly One More Time," where a South Korean TV show used VR technology to revive a daughter who died from a rare disease, a video that moved millions to tears.

At the venue, a clinical psychology PhD student argued that doing so could reduce a lot of their workload, and that this is actually a part of the grieving process nowadays. Many companies are also profiting from this.

I still vividly remember Hiroshi mercilessly rebuking this PhD student. It was my first time witnessing such a scene, seeing a purely academic argument become so intensely charged.

Hiroshi believed that these manufacturers were creating monsters, treating it as a form of entertainment, and that they must not cross this line.

This time in Delft, I threw this question back at him: On one hand, there is digital immortality with an increasingly lower barrier to entry; on the other hand, you are calling for the Presence of Absence through TeleAbsence. Why do you get to define what makes a "good" Absence, while others using AI synthetic data cannot? Where exactly do you draw the line regarding the aesthetics and ethics of TeleAbsence in your heart?

He didn't draw an absolute line, but he gave a word: Abstraction.

Engineering pursues extremely realistic fidelity, wishing they could replicate even the frequency of a breath. But Art pursues abstraction—leaving behind a shadow, a gentle breeze, the gap between piano keys. The former attempts to deny death, ultimately creating a monster; the latter gazes into death, leading to grief itself.

So how is this line drawn, and what's the implication for CHI? Hiroshi couldn't articulate it clearly, either. He generously joked that TeleAbsence had been rejected by CHI for two consecutive years. It was finally accepted by the PRESENCE journal, and even in that article, the boundaries between Ethics and Aesthetics were not explicitly defined. Perhaps Hiroshi will still need to spend many years creating more works, continuously interpreting this blurry Design Space.

I thought:

Large Language Models are tirelessly predicting the next token, while a life can only strive to make it through the next moment. One is infinitely reproducible code, the other is an irreversible passing. Perhaps this is the boundary between monsters and humans?

Remember and Forget: Amber and Ember

A person dies twice: once physically, and once when they are forgotten.

People die twice. First, when they die. Then when they are forgotten.

TeleAbsence is creating various possibilities to cross time: conversations between the living, people of the past, and people of the future. The Past and the Afterlife.

Hiroshi recited a poem of his own:

What fades is not lost. An "amber" remembers the light it once held. An "ember" remembers the warmth it once gave. Between them breathes "TeleAbsence" — the quiet glow of what remains, and the gentle reverberation of what is gone.

When he uttered the word "Amber," my heart trembled. That happens to be my name.

Amber is an incredibly rare anti-entropic miracle in nature. A drop of resin envelops a life, no matter how minute, traversing millions of years in silence. In the face of amber, the cruelty of time loses its power. Amber provides memories that transcend time, while Ember—burning ash—provides warmth in the present moment.

The default setting of the universe is forgetting; it is an endless increase in entropy. That is why memory appears so expensive; it is a magnificent act of anti-entropy. TeleAbsence breathes right in the space between remembering and forgetting.

What exactly should we leave behind? Previously, in the ancient city of Petra in Jordan, entire mountains were carved into tombstones for the deceased; the city's facades were the glorious memories of dead families. That civilization perished; those stones became eternal amber, but the ember that ignited them extinguished long ago.

Now, AI has given us unprecedented amber—infinite storage, infinite generation, available to everyone. But when everything can be copied and preserved, forgetting itself paradoxically becomes an active aesthetic and ethical choice.

After this lecture, Japanese desserts made by Cake Researcher Jie Li were laid out on the table. Matcha, strawberry, sesame, charcoal—like exquisite miniature sculptures.

Holding our forks and knives, a hesitation lingered in our hearts: Should I destroy their perfect forms? In Japanese aesthetics, there is a concept called "Kire" (to cut/sever)—beauty lies in its fleeting nature. Only in the exact moment you slice into it does it transform from an untouchable, stunning memory into present energy that melts in your mouth. Just like the intricate and magnificent Tibetan Buddhist sand mandalas that are destined to be destroyed.

With that cut, the ritual of beauty is truly completed. A conversion from Amber into Ember. Death and rebirth. Safeguarding memories and embracing forgetting with grace. All things flow within this cycle.

Timely and Timeless

His final slide read: Timely and Timeless.

What legacy do you wish to leave for those living in 2200? How do you want to be remembered? Hiroshi asked: What do you want to leave for people in the year 2200? He wants his legacy to live until 2200, to be remembered until 2200.

That is 174 years from now. Can a PDF stored in the ACM database really traverse a century? Perhaps. But what lives in that space and time will certainly not be a string of synthesized code or an Avatar. If people in 2200 are still contemplating the boundary between bits and atoms, and still discussing the weight of absence, then Hiroshi's vitality may still be pulsating.

The torrent of academia is forever chasing the wave of the "Timely," and we are caught up in this endless rat race. But you must build a "Timeless" coordinate system for yourself within your heart.

When you push academia to the very end and strip away the external shells, what remains is vision and commitment. It is about whether you are truly willing to spend twenty years, thirty years, or even a lifetime slowly climbing around that mist-shrouded tower. Even if no one cheers for you, you walk lap after lap, until the light pierces through the clouds just right, letting everyone see your world.

He used Tangible Media to tell the world that information is touchable. TeleAbsence transmits human life across time.

I suddenly realized: Life itself is his medium.

Forty years of choices, stubbornness, fervor, loss, and refusal to compromise—every step of that endless upward spiral around the tower... All of this superimposed together forms the most majestic masterpiece. Papers will be drowned out by newer literature, and Demos will rust and break down as the years pass; but how much heart and soul a person uses to burn through this lifetime—that posture will remain forever.

Life. This is perhaps the grandest and most poetic medium in the world.

April 10, 2026, TU Delft