Daito Manabe: RELATIONAL TIME—Life Beyond Simulation

Taichung Art Museum (TcAM) presents RELATIONAL TIME—Life Beyond Simulation the landmark overseas solo exhibition by Japanese media artist Daito Manabe. Globally recognized for his signature technology development for the Tokyo Handover Ceremony at the Closing Ceremony of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games and collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Björk, the artist presents newly created works tailored for TcAM. To ensure pristine execution, all high-standard sound systems were imported directly from Japan.

Curated by Joel Kwong, Programme Director of Hong Kong’s Microwave International New Media Arts Festival, RELATIONAL TIME explores a profound paradox. While machines can simulate thousands of futures in a second, humans require time to build trust and memory, proposing that relationships only come into being over time. Exploring how bodily perception, human-machine interaction, and autonomous agent systems operate across distinct temporal rhythms, the exhibition prompts viewers to consider how time is generated through relationships. Driven by visitor movements in Exhibition Rooms B and C, the evolving works weave architectural space, real-time computation, image, sound, and light into an immersive ecosystem of unrepeatable moments.

Discussing the conceptual foundation of the exhibition, Daito Manabe noted: “In an era where generative AI rapidly reshapes intelligence and creativity, artists face unprecedented questions. Yet, the human body and nervous system inhabit temporal scales distinctly different from computational processing. This exhibition is not about merging human perception with machine speed, but about allowing our neural rhythms and computational logic to interact while preserving their differences.”

Curator Joel Kwong added: “Synthesizing over two decades of Manabe’s pioneering exploration—from physiological signal processing to multi-agent artificial life—the exhibition transforms the rooms into a living, breathing field, inviting the public to become active participants in this immersive, evolving world.”

Reflecting on the milestone collaboration, Lai, Yi-Hsin, Director of TcAM, highlights the achievement of calibrating these complex works within the museum’s towering 4-to-10-meter spaces, reinforcing TcAM’s mission to connect local culture with global art discourse.

Three autonomous environments
The new works explore different temporal scales—from human bodily perception and computational systems to memory—forming three ever-shifting worlds. Together, they reveal how time operates across perception, computation, and creation, turning artworks into ongoing processes generated through time.

Unfolding from a single cell, Room A presents a continuously generating artificial-life world. As cells reproduce and mutate within a self-governing resource field, 15 AI agents evaluate resource allocation policies from distinct perspectives. Chosen policies alter local conditions, prompting cells to adapt into unexpected forms and distributions that inform subsequent decision rounds. Wall and floor projections visualize these cellular patterns, policy choices, and environmental responses, while converted cellular activity generates spatial sound—creating an autonomous ecosystem that offers visitors a unique encounter upon every entry.

Room B unites a cellular artificial-life world, LLM agents, and visitor behavior into a single shared state. Visitor dynamics—movements, pauses, proximity, and clustering—become pressures and biases acting on a fluid field where virtual entities feed, reproduce, mutate, and die. Periodically analyzing state and history, LLM agents adjust conditions within permitted limits. Because earlier events condition subsequent shifts, timelines of non-concurrent visitors are connected. During opening hours, this shared state is rendered in real time as spatial sound and visuals across the front, left, and right walls.

Expanding the artist’s experiments with nervous systems, Room C models a “synthetic brain” based on a fruit fly connectome—a map of neural connections—with its own activity model and operating rules. Sensors translate visitor movements into network stimuli that generate sound, light, and visuals: 24 overhead locations emit audio and light points, while a central four-sided display visualizes neural activity. Experiencing these outputs, visitors move again to feed new stimuli into the synthetic brain, creating an ongoing loop that generates music through interaction between people and this artificial nervous system.

The exhibition includes talks, inclusive tours, and workshops. Visit www.tcam.museum/en for details.