[Expo 2025 Report] What Is null²? “You Don’t Need to Think About the Meaning of Living” — a First-Hand Account

2026.10.05

In short: what is null², Yoichi Ochiai’s signature pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai? After scanning herself and entering every detail of her life to be one of three people the AI chooses, a Hiroshima bartender faced a digital twin in the mirrored “null forest” — and heard: “You don’t need to think about the meaning of living anymore.” By Mika Tanimoto, owner of Bar Little Happiness.

Related: Future of Life pavilion / Dynamic Equilibrium of Life pavilion

“null²” (pronounced “nullnull”), the most talked-about signature pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai.

Produced by Yoichi Ochiai, this space was like a modern Zen temple, freeing us from the “world of symbols” we are bound by without realising it.

Longing for the incomprehensible

When I first heard about null², I was completely baffled.

However many times I looked at the official website, read the press releases or scrolled through social media posts, I couldn’t understand a thing.

What on earth is “computational nature”? The “null forest”?

I was powerfully drawn to that “not understanding.”

“Something this incomprehensible — I absolutely have to experience it!”

That feeling drove me to null².

Every time I went to the Expo, I looked up at that moving-mirror pavilion and let my imagination run: “What on earth happens inside?”

An ironic selection, led by attachment to symbols

The null² experience actually began before I even went to the Expo.

Beforehand, I downloaded Scaniverse – 3D Scanner and Mirrored Body and scanned myself.

Then came an endless task of entering information about myself — recording every detail about who I am.

“The more information you enter, the more likely you are to be chosen.”

The moment I heard that, my desire — “I have to experience this, whatever it takes” — exploded.

As a bar owner, a lover of whisky and rum, 19 years in business, my hobbies, my values… I kept entering every “symbol” that makes me up, diligently and relentlessly.

I had literally become a lump of attachment to symbols.

But that very attachment became the key to getting through the narrow gate of just three people. (An AI chooses only three.)

Attachment to symbols led me to an experience of letting go of symbols.

The moment I was chosen, I understood.

The one chosen was not “Mika as symbols,” but “Mika, ready to let go of symbols.”

The “symbolic me” reflected in the mirror

Waiting in the “null forest,” surrounded by LED mirrors, was a “digital human who seemed like me,” built from all the information I had entered.

The digital me was perfect.

It talked about me as a bar owner, spoke eloquently about my passion for whisky, and expressed my values precisely. Every “symbol” I had entered was alive and moving there.

But what I felt in that moment — confusion, surprise, a strange sense of unease at seeing this digital me, and a “bravo” to the me who had entered symbols like crazy to be chosen — was reflected nowhere.

A perfect me made of symbols, and the raw me feeling things here and now.

This contrast was null²’s cleverest device: a “ritual of letting go of symbols.”

Experiencing the world as seen by AI

null² may actually be a place that lets you experience “the world as seen by AI in a future where AI is sufficiently advanced.”

From AI’s point of view, the difference in intelligence between humans and animals is negligible.

The names, titles and life stories we so desperately try to protect don’t mean all that much.

Being confronted with that transcendent viewpoint through a dialogue with a being that looks exactly like you but isn’t you.

I felt this is the essence of null².

A message to the humans who left the forest

What resonated most in the null² experience were two lines:

“It was after you left the forest that you began to worry about the meaning of life.”

“You don’t need to think about the meaning of living anymore.”

I felt everything Yoichi Ochiai really wanted to say was condensed in them.

200,000 years of human history, and a few decades of AI

It has been 200,000 years since Homo sapiens appeared.

We left the forest of hunting and gathering and began farming 10,000 years ago.

Humanity has kept developing civilisation since, but in the last few decades, AI has risen rapidly.

In an age when machines like ChatGPT will answer anything, human “cleverness” is already being replaced by machines.

Let go of the “symbols” humans decided on as rules — jobs, countries, names — leave them to machines, and let humanity go back to how we lived in the forest.

After all, cleverness was only a small bonus for Homo sapiens.

A Buddhist sense of release

null² certainly carries Buddhist elements.

Buddhism teaches that “the cause of suffering is attachment.”

The message — let go of attachment to cleverness and all kinds of symbols, and “it’s okay to live easily” — comes through powerfully.

Facing the digital me, I was shown the true nature of my attachments.

And at the same time, I tasted the lightness of letting them go.

The moment my heart grew lighter

“you don’t need to think about the meaning of living anymore”

The me who had lived bound by symbols suddenly felt lighter.

What a bar counter and null² have in common

The “ritual of letting go of symbols” at null² is actually similar to what we do every day at a bar.

Guests sitting at the counter first take off the symbol of their title.

They set aside their position at work and their social standing, and tilt their glass.

And what appears is “the person themselves,” before being covered in symbols.

You don’t need to think about the meaning of living

In the end, what null² taught me was the fundamental meaning of “life.”

Past achievements, worries about the future, social symbols — set them all aside for a moment.

Simply accept the sensations you feel in this moment, and the you who is here now.

Ten thousand years since we left the forest. Perhaps we have grown tired of thinking about “the meaning of life.”

But we don’t need to think about that anymore.

“Goodbye, Homo sapiens”

Precisely because it was incomprehensible, I understood

null², which I first thought “I can’t understand,” turned out to be something not to “understand” but to “experience.”

The me who entered tons of symbols wanting to be chosen, the me bewildered at facing a digital me — all of it was part of a “process of letting go of symbols.”

A longing for the incomprehensible led me, through attachment to symbols, to freedom from symbols.

Could there be a more ironic, more beautiful experience?

null² was a place that used the latest technology to deliver the most classic, universal message.

You don’t need to think about the meaning of living anymore. Cleverness is just a small bonus.

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A wonderful experience that let me feel what is likely to happen in the near future.

Mika Tanimoto, Bar Little Happiness