Taichung Art Museum (TcAM) presents RELATIONAL TIME – Life Beyond Simulation (October 3, 2026 – January 3, 2027), 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 icons such as Ryuichi Sakamoto, Perfume, Björk, and CERN, the artist presents newly created works tailored for TcAM. To ensure pristine execution, all high-standard sound systems for these pieces have been shipped 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. The exhibition explores how bodily perception, human-machine interaction, and autonomous agent systems operate across distinct temporal rhythms, prompting viewers to consider how time is generated through relationships. As the works evolve — with visitors’ movements in Exhibition Rooms B and C feeding into the systems — they weave together architectural space, real-time computation, image, sound, and light. This creates an immersive ecosystem where visitors encounter 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.”
Elaborating on the curatorial vision, Curator Joel Kwong added:
“This exhibition brings together more than two decades of Manabe’s pioneering exploration. From physiological signal processing to multi-agent artificial life, the rooms are transformed into a living, breathing field. Rooted in this immersive environment, we invite the public to step in and become active participants in this evolving world.”
Reflecting on the milestone collaboration, Lai, Yi-Hsin, Director of TcAM, stated:
“It is an honor for TcAM to host Daito Manabe’s first major overseas solo exhibition, offering a rare synthesis of artistic intuition and tech rigor. Spanning spaces 4 to 10 meters high, the installations required precise calibration and imported Japanese acoustic systems to match the artist’s sonic vision. Navigating these architectural hurdles reinforces TcAM’s mission to connect local cultural grounding with global art discourse. We are grateful to the cross-disciplinary teams from Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan who overcame technical challenges to realize this visionary showcase.”
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.
Exhibition Room A begins with a single cell, from which a continuously generating world of artificial life unfolds.
Here, cells move, take in resources, reproduce, mutate, and die, while the resource field changes according to its own rules. At the same time, 15 AI agents propose and critique resource allocation policies from different perspectives, and the selected policy alters local resource conditions. The cells respond to the changed environment, producing unexpected forms and distributions, which then inform the next round of decisions.
Through large-scale images on the walls and floor, the artist presents the cells’ forms and distributions, the resource allocation decisions, and the world’s responses, while spatial sound is generated by converting cellular activity — together presenting a dynamic world that continuously operates according to its own rules, allowing visitors to encounter a different appearance of this world each time they enter the exhibition space.
Exhibition Room B connects a cellular artificial-life world, LLM agents, and visitors’ behavior through a single shared state.
Visitors’ movements, pauses, proximity, and clustering are transformed into pressures and biases that act on the world’s fluid field. Meanwhile, virtual individuals feed, reproduce, mutate, and die, and LLM agents periodically interpret the state and history to adjust conditions within permitted limits.
The effects of earlier events remain as conditions for subsequent changes, connecting the times of visitors who were not present together. During opening hours, this shared state appears in real time as images on the front, left, and right walls and as spatial sound.
Exhibition Room C continues the artist’s experiments with nervous systems as a means of generating sound and images.
It uses the connectivity recorded in a fruit fly connectome — a map of neural connections — as the basis for a “synthetic brain” with its own neural activity model and operating rules.
Sensors translate visitors’ movements into stimuli, which propagate through the network and generate sound, light, and images. Sound and points of light emerge from 24 locations overhead, while a central four-sided display visualizes neural activity.
Visitors perceive these outputs and move again, returning new stimuli to the synthetic brain. This ongoing cycle generates music through the interaction between people and the artificially constructed nervous system.
DAITO MANABE Solo Exhibition RELATIONAL TIME – Life Beyond Simulation
Oct 3, 2026 – Jan 3, 2027
Exhibition Rooms A, B, and C, Taichung Art Museum
Curator | Joel Kwong
Partners | Studio Daito Manabe, FIL, Rhizomatiks, Citrus Flow, and Hello World
Sponsors | Panasonic, BWV, STARLUX Airlines, Kloud Hotel, and Yamaha
For more information | Website / Facebook / Instagram
