Kagami, an ambitious mixed-reality performance on Asia Topa’s 2025 program, is a collaboration between the late Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto and Todd Eckert, founder of trailblazing company Tindrum, which produced the full-dimensional film with augmented reality tech. Here, audiences are invited to don “magic glasses” and come face-to-face with Sakamoto as he plays on a grand piano.

Right now, Broadsheet's offering Access members limited double passes to Kagami on opening night. We chatted to Eckert about his desire to deepen the connection between artist and audience, and diminish the limitations of time.

A lot of adjectives have been thrown around in an attempt to describe Kagami. You’ve previously said that “the world doesn’t have vocabulary for such performances yet”. So what is Kagami to you?

It sometimes sounds overblown, but music for me is really a sacred expression of human beings at their very best. The act of creation – performance or composition – is the purest form of that expression. Ryuichi Sakamoto’s work is so human, so gorgeous, so fundamentally real, and I had to find a way to present him in performance so that the public could feel connected to him in that moment forever. Kagami is that thing – and while it is couched in a kind of technological breakthrough, that’s not the point. The tech makes it work, but the artist to audience connection is the heart of Kagami.

Your career (as the director of content development for Magic Leap, and the founder of Tindrum) is pioneering performances that not only bottle our full-dimensional reality but enhance it. How has Kagami moved its audiences?

I’ve been really pleased that so many people experience a real emotional response to the work. There’s a lot of crying, but also random stuff like dancing. I’ve heard from a lot of people that it takes them a while to process what they’ve seen because it doesn’t fit into any existing category. It’s just so new. And the fact that he died a couple months before we opened seems to bring a lot of stuff up.

You’ve worked in the music industry for decades. What drew you to Sakamoto’s compositions?

I heard him first when I was a teenager, I think it was Left Handed Dream. And that’s a really precious part of life – you feel super awkward all the time, and everything is new and frequently daunting. And when Ryuichi’s score to Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence came out, it felt like the only thing in the world that understood me. I can’t even tell you why, it just did, so it was the sound of my life for something like a year – Walkman on, hands buried in overcoat pockets, listening to it ALL of the time. There’s a varied bunch of emotion in that work, and it feels so honest. And he would release record after record, all pretty different, but all imbued with that honesty. And the longer I listened to him, the more complete the relationship felt, which was only enhanced when I actually met him in the ’90s.

The New York Times described Kagami as an “affecting meditation on grief”. Tell us about your experience directing Sakamoto and creating the performance in anticipation of his passing.

After Ryuichi died it was always important to me that we not make Kagami a memorial, because those types of events are energetically limited. It’s easy to say “let us pay homage to this legendary figure”, and it totally makes sense, but if you’ve never heard Ryuichi then why would you care? My point – and he and I were in agreement with this – was to make something that would embody the energy and beauty of him in performance. Have it be a snapshot of the artist as happening in real time forever. That way, the relationship could be self-perpetuating with an audience forever, at least theoretically. Because people are still going to be discovering Ryuichi’s work for a long, long time, and now they hopefully will feel a deeper, more human connection with the man.

Sakamoto posed the question, “will the squids that conquer the earth after humanity still listen to me?” Was that his intention with Kagami? Permanence? Eternity? To cheat death?

In a sense that’s the whole point of Kagami – if not to cheat death, then to slap around our perceptions of it a little. Ryuichi was a pretty playful guy and he liked the idea of perpetuating his career through something radical.

There’s fear that advances in technology are isolating us from each other. How does Kagami harness tech to bring people together?

It’s such a crucial question, because we’ve allowed technology to barrel forwards for decades and only recently stopped to question whether it might be a really bad idea. Possibly too late, of course, but in the question of Kagami, we’ve gone through great pains to make certain the point of the experience was not the tech at all, but instead what the tech affords us. A connection with Ryuichi would have been fantastic even before he died – he never toured that much. And now that he’s gone, the show promotes connection because the audience – their agency, their energy – means each time you see it will feel a bit different. Maybe it’s the morning and people are feeling quiet. Maybe it’s the evening and they’re super elevated. As the director, I have very little interest in promoting a technological agenda, but I’m happy to immerse people in Ryuichi’s world every single day.

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