TAxT opens October 30: AI conversations, rice-husk water and birdsong disrupted by visitors

What happens when your footsteps become flowing water and lingering distorts birdsong? The 2026 Taoyuan Art x Technology Festival, TAxT, will run October 30–November 22 at Chung Yuan Cultural and Creative Park under the theme “Be Tokens.” Eleven groups of technology artists from Taiwan, Macao, Japan, France and Germany will participate. Admission to the exhibition in Warehouses 1, 2, 3 and 10 and outdoor spaces is free. As of October 27, it has yet to open: official visualizations of the works are not records of the finished exhibition.

How people enter computation through tokens

Curated by Yi-Ping Hung, this is the festival’s tenth edition since its launch in 2017. A token is a unit into which language models divide text for processing. The exhibition extends that concept to speech, behavior and memory, asking what can be recombined when experience becomes data and what feelings remain difficult to encode. Its three strands concern shared human–technology environments, experiences jointly shaped by bodies and systems, and understanding and the right to speak within language.

“Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence are in Conversation” gives abstract dialogue a visible form. Two industrial robotic arms hold screens displaying virtual characters developed by Osaka University of Arts and Tainan National University of the Arts. When a visitor asks a question, two independent generative systems continue discussing it. Tainan’s LUO LAB and Osaka’s Ando LAB will also present student work and the characters’ development process, revealing the experiments behind the avatars rather than simply an interface that answers questions.

Water data, moving bodies and coastal birds

ANY&ALL DESIGN STUDIO’s “One Hundred Faces of Water” begins with Taoyuan’s farmland, ponds and irrigation systems. Rice husks form an undulating landscape while local water-management information becomes animated projections. The ripples change in real time as visitors move, making footsteps part of the image. Beyond the projection’s appearance, the work asks how data describing land can become a spatial experience through walking.

“Habitat of Sound #2: Artificial Habitat,” by a team from Ming Chuan University’s Department of Architecture, returns to the tensions between ecology and engineering along the Guanyin and Datan coast. A walk-in nest structure pierced by aluminum tubes forms an artificial habitat. Bird calls sound through the tubes’ resonance instead of conventional speakers. The length of a visitor’s stay triggers distortion and fragmentation: approaching can become an environmental disturbance as well as a closer encounter. The interaction places conservation questions in relation to the visitor’s body.

Check exhibition dates and individual activities

In “Fragments of Perception,” Adrian Dittert combines tape lines with AI imagery. Visitors’ spoken words are translated into images through a configured prompting filter. New images emerge in the center while older ones move outward, forming an evolving visual memory. Compared with the water and birdsong installations, it offers another mode of participation: speaking, walking and staying each alter a work, allowing visitors to compare how systems respond to their actions.

The park is at No. 33, Zhongren Road, Zhongli District, Taoyuan. Exhibition hours are 10:00–18:00, with Monday closures. Seven on-site educational activities and a school outreach program are also planned; the fourth Taoyuan Technology Performing Arts Award’s gold- and silver-prize works will premiere during the festival. Check each activity’s time and participation rules separately. Before visiting, use the official TAxT website for exhibition, performance and education information; group tours have their own reservation link.