The July 2025 Taiwan Collaboratory, hosted at Taipei National University of the Arts’ Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, is a partnership between Professor 黃建宏 (Taipei National University of the Arts, Director of the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts), Professor 李鴻瓊 (National Taiwan University, co-founder of the Asia Theories Network), 王柏偉 (Digital Art Foundation), 楊嘉麗 (National Center for High-Performance Computing, Taiwan), and Jiayi Young (Professor & Chair, Department of Design, University of California, Davis).
This is a focused workshop bringing together artists, engineers, and critical humanists working on Taiwan-related projects. The aim is to co-develop AI-driven initiatives grounded in Taiwan’s distinctive cultural, ethical, and technological context. Participants will explore models of artist participation and examine how engineers can be meaningfully integrated into collaborative processes. The involvement of students from across the partner institutions in this workshop is a key milestone in advancing the project.
Two-Day Program:
Day 1: Laying Foundations & Building Shared Language (Plenary)
Day 2: Early Co-Ideation and Project Framing (Small Working Groups)
>> Link to workshop program. [Day 1 speaker photos are yet to be added to the slide show below.]
The workshop is a collaborative space for collective thinking and leadership. It encourages dynamic discussions and interdisciplinary exploration, laying the groundwork for an impactful AI research initiative over the next two years.
The ethos of the workshop is co-production. The contested sociotechnical disorientation of AI has articulated itself through a framing of AI development as a progressive, inevitable movement from Narrow AI (task-specific AI) to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and beyond—often toward a form of intelligence that is either equivalent to or surpasses human cognition with a linear, almost teleological advancement of AI moving through predefined “stages” of increasing autonomy, capability, speed, and integrating into human and non-human ecologies.
Yet, if AI is not to be taken as a fixed object or agent in this teleological race toward AGI, but instead as a liminal site where the conditions of its emergence, cultural inscriptions, and political economies remain in continuous renegotiation, then how does it not merely extend but destabilize and reconstitute boundaries? What models—beyond the metaphor of ‘intelligence’—can recalibrate our understanding of cognition, agency, and the social? Can we conceive of AI not as an endpoint of machinic acceleration, but as an assemblage of histories, labor, infrastructures, and governance that posit new ethical, aesthetic, and ontological engagements? We hope to expand perspectives within and beyond established paradigms. We encourage a shift in mindset, challenging participants to think beyond their expertise and explore how their work intersects with other disciplines.
Three-day Program:
Day 1: Curated discussion of ideas among all.
Day 2: Break into groups of key ideas.
Day 3: Think together about steps ahead.