Launch of AI for ALL / ALL for AI initiative

Cross-disciplinary partnerships in arts, humanities, and engineering.

Opening Act, Taiwan Festival 2026 launches the AI for ALL / ALL for AI initiative. The festival positions Taiwan as an essential techno-aesthetic node in global conversations about AI. Centering works and live performances by Taiwanese artists, the festival examines how the uneven acceleration of AI affects marginalized communities, reshapes geopolitical relations, binds technological and industrial infrastructures to national policy, and challenges inherited human-centered epistemologies and ethics. These questions unfold through three interrelated forms: artistic works and performances; panels bringing Taiwanese and international artists, designers, scholars and curators into dialogue across distinct regional perspectives; and the opening of the broader AI for ALL project through an in-depth thematic discussion and a call for manifestos. Together, these encounters place Taiwan-specific concerns within broader Asian and transregional frameworks, creating a platform through which artistic practice, critical inquiry, and situated knowledge can circulate across disciplines and geographies.

Call for manifestos

Untranslated Dreams: Uneven Manifestos
This is a collaborative project that invites participants to think with AI from situated pressure points. Beginning with culture, language, and memory the project asks what AI absorbs, translates, distorts, or leaves unresolved. We invite manifestos speaking to these questions from a range of perspectives. Submissions have no word limits or stylistic expectations. We conceptualize the manifesto as a space for critique, imagination, possibility, and change. The project’s featured lead manifesto, “Fragments for Planetary Dream-Machines,” is by Chun-Mei Chuang, can be seen on the project website along with submission instructions.

Project overview
AI is advancing faster than the collaborative frameworks needed to critically shape it, resulting in innovation that remains siloed and insufficiently grounded in cultural and humanistic knowledge. This gap is especially evident in Asia, where complex histories, geopolitical tensions, and vast linguistic diversity remain poorly represented in dominant AI models. AI for ALL / ALL for AI is a multi-year, cross-disciplinary partnership across six Asian regions and University of California (UC) campuses that brings these issues into sustained, collective inquiry. Initiated and coordinated by the Asia Theories Network (ATN), the project convenes artists, designers, humanists, and AI engineers to emphasize co-production as a method for generating shared knowledge and fostering cross-field discourse. Since 2024, the project has established an international research network. Building on this foundation, a structured program of research and dissemination is planned through 2029. The project operates through two complementary components: one focused on ongoing research development through research clusters, theme-based virtual exchanges and presentations, and AI literacy tutorials; and another focused on dissemination, sharing scholarly and creative outcomes through exhibitions, symposia, public forums, and publications across Asia and the UC system.

Project themes
Five thematic focuses emerged during the project's co-production workshop at National Taiwan University in April 2025, shaped by a core leadership team representing institutions in India, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States. The themes guided the formation of research clusters with the aim of developing collaborative artworks, design, writing, and engineering prototypes.

[1]  Sensational Failure: Obsolescence and Cognition. [2] Radical GeneAIologies: Thresholds and Counterhistories. [3] Planetary Co(m)motions: Care and Affect. [4] Situated Systems: Locality and Language. [5] Unpredictable Machines: Embodiment and Institutions.

Partner institutions
Asia Theories Network / ET@T, Taiwan / National Center for High-Performance Computing, Taiwan / National Taiwan University, Taiwan / Taipei National University of the Arts, Taiwan / Tokyo University of the Arts, Japan / University of Tokyo, Japan / National Gallery Singapore, Singapore / Kyung Hee University, South Korea / Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines / Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), India / University of California, Davis, USA / University of California, Irvine, USA

The project's genesis builds on and expands the international consortium established by the Asia Theories Network. In 2024, the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) and National Taiwan University (NTU) received the Global Affairs UC Davis–Taiwan Collaborative Research Fund in Memory of Larry Vanderhoef, providing the foundation for this initiative.

Contact: Hello@aiforall.asia