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AboutTAxT
About TAxT – Taoyuan Art x Technology Festival
Taoyuan City is Taiwan’s leading industrial and technological hub and has been ranked as the #1 smart city in international evaluations. With its unique environment combining culture and technology, the Taoyuan City Government launched the TAxT – Taoyuan Art x Technology Festival in 2017 to develop a cultural-tech city. The festival integrates multiple goals, including internationalization, local engagement, campus cultivation, and industry collaboration.
Since 2019, the festival has further introduced the Taoyuan Tech Performing Arts Award to discover and nurture talent at the intersection of technology and performing arts. TAxT is currently one of the few large-scale tech-art festivals in Taiwan organized by a local government and has become an important platform for cross-disciplinary exchange between technology and the arts.
Director’s Preface
Empowering the City's Cultural Imagination through Technology
Launched in 2017, the TAxT (Taoyuan Art x Technology Festival) marks its tenth edition in 2026. For a city, a decade represents a significant journey of accumulating energy, establishing a direction, and rethinking the future. TAxT began by exploring the intersection of art and technology and has since expanded into digital art, immersive experiences, interdisciplinary performances, artificial intelligence, and international exchange, gradually evolving into a signature cultural-tech brand for Taoyuan. In 2023, TAxT even engaged in an artwork exchange with the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. Starting in 2024, the festival has relocated to the Chung Yuan Cultural And Creative Park, bringing art and technology closer to the city, industries, and everyday life.
Taoyuan is, in itself, a city that exists in close symbiosis with technology. From manufacturing and the electronics industry to the development of smart technologies, technology has never been a distant concept; rather, it is an integral part of urban operations and the lives of citizens. Therefore, we look forward to this technology art festival doing more than simply showcasing new innovations; we hope that, through artists’ observations and imagination, technology can be utilized as a means to understand the contemporary world, raise questions, and think about the future.
The theme of this year is “Be Tokens: The Real World >>> In Generation.” Starting with the "Token," the basic unit of generative AI, we reflect further on the scenario when words, images, bodies, memories, and even life experiences can all be transformed into data and regenerated, how will we understand ourselves—and how will we live with technology? The exhibition unfolds across three dimensions—co-habitation, co-creation, and co-articulation—inviting the audience to re-examine the emerging world of the AI era through diverse perspectives, including nature, ecology, the body, dreams, healthcare, memory, and language, etc.
After a decade-long journey, we envision TAxT as more than just an annual technology art festival; we see it as a platform where the city continuously accumulates creativity and talent while fostering international connections. Technology will constantly evolve, but what truly matters to culture is how people confront change, how they envision possibilities, and the kind of future we wish to create together.
We cordially invite you to step into the 2026 TAxT to engage with a world that is still "in generation" and to envision the cultural landscape of Taoyuan for the coming decade.
Hybrid Evolution · Future Life New Type
This year, the exhibition takes a cue from “token,” the fundamental unit of generative AI. Before entering an AI model, text is often broken down into computational fragments, then new content is generated through predictive recombination. The curatorial team takes this concept a step further and proposes the question: if language can be broken down into tokens, are human bodies, memories, sentiments, and actions also gradually becoming data that can be read and reborn? Through three sub-themes—“Co-habitation,” “Co-creation,” and “Co-articulation” —the exhibition intends to explore how AI enters everyday life, participates in creational process, and establishes new communication modes. The “Co-habitation” section focuses on how technology steps into the daily lives of humans and nature. “Habitat of Sound #2: Artificial Habitat” takes the Taoyuan coast and little tern conservation as clues, where viewers’ approaching would cause bird calls to experience delayed distortion, and transforms interaction into an environmental disturbance; “Eye of the Swarm” by Hu Chin-Shiang and Kuro Art Lab constructs a collective sensory field applying AI imagery, power plant, and skeleton tracking; French collective hellobastworkshop’s “AURA” transforms visitors into unique colors and lights, and their halos overlap upon meeting; “Walking Appendage” reflects on human’s dependence on digital tools through outdoor animal sculptures and a QR code game. The “Co-creation” section departs from dreams, land, healthcare, and perception. ULTRACOMBOS’s “40Hz (V2)” draws on the imagery of Peter Pan chasing his shadow and the concept of lucid dreaming, feeding dreams into an AI to form a “collective dream pool”; “One Hundred Faces of Water” combines Taoyuan water conservancy, rice paddy landscapes, and real-time rendering, allowing footsteps to alter projected water ripples; “The Symmetrical Hallucinations: A Medical Mirror” and German artist Adrian Dittert’s “Fragments of Perception” question how technology restructures the ways we understand our bodies and the world. The “Co-articulation” section examines the relationship between AI, human language, and creation. “#5480 Times of South Breeze: An Unfinished Genetic Code” uses real family letters as a corpus, with AI generating text and mechanical writing leaving ink marks; “Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence are in Conversation,” a collaboration between LUO LAB from Tainan National University of the Arts and Ando LAB from Osaka University of the Arts, enables two AIs to converse through robotic arms. Bianca Lei’s “Artificial Iteration (AI)” shifts between AI-generated imagery, physical painting, and digital translation, questioning the boundaries between the creator and the original work.
