Joyce Chiou, General and Artistic Director

The Variables of Our Age,
the Constant of Our Humanity

Technology originates in human nature, and human nature can no longer exist apart from it.

When composer HUANG Ruo first told me his idea, I was intrigued instantly. He observed how people are glued to their phones and forget the world around them. So he wondered: what if, instead of resisting this habit, we created a concert where people could remain on their phones and still share an experience together? If an orchestra has ninety-nine musicians, then imagine ninety-nine phones—each carrying a different timbre, a different line of music. Gathered together, they would form a vast, living symphony.

City of Floating Sounds, the opening program of the 2026 Arts NOVA, was born. The mobile phones do more than play music. They guide audiences through the city on five different routes, each revealing its own cityscape and gathering its own circle of fellow walkers. The noise of traffic, the chanting of temples, the rustle of trees and insects, and the quiet exchanges between companions gradually weave themselves into the score. Eventually, all five routes converge inside of the theater, where the full orchestral version unfolds once again. Some may wander freely between the stage and the auditorium or stand among the instrumental sections, listening for how differently music lives when it comes from a phone and when it is breathed into being by musicians onstage.

Beyond our phones, AI has also become one of our closest daily interlocutors. But the "perfect answers" it gives us raise an uneasy question: are they universal truths, or simply responses crafted uniquely for each of us? As One is adapted from a true story: an individual distressed by climate anxiety becomes so immersed in conversations with an AI that he comes to believe self-sacrifice might save the world. The work returns to the human core of the AI debate, probing consciousness, selfhood, and identity, inviting us to reflect on the ethics of what we are creating.

Technology grants freedom, yet it reshapes emotion, behavior, and thought. Is this dependence, or is it a form of symbiosis?

Clic explores a life governed by algorithms. Through brilliant actor-puppet interplay, and within a retro-futuristic world, the production uses some of the least "technological" theatrical methods to reveal a medical system ruled by AI. Dentures, artificial lenses, pacemakers —have they not already become our earliest wearable technologies? The result is a work of puppetry that is darkly humorous yet deeply thought-provoking.

Three works in this year's Arts NOVA contemplate "relationships." Piano piano is the fruit of a twenty-year friendship between two artists: one a celebrated figure in new media arts, the other a luminous voice in contemporary music. Returning to the crystal ball and the piano, they fulfill a youthful dream of performing together. The result is a poetic encounter where illusion and music interlace, a gentle piano-piano universe open to all.

Hikikomori – The Shelter examines family and intimacy through the story of a teenager who locks himself in his room, communicating only through his phone, refusing school, work, and social contact. Families quarrel, each convinced of their own truth, leaving the one caught in between with nowhere to stand. Audience members receive headphones with one of three perspectives: mother, father, or child, hearing the same story unfold through different inner worlds. The creators lead a post-show conversation, piecing together the full picture through mutual listening. It is a work especially resonant for couples and families with teenagers.

"Quand on s'est rencontrés c'était parfait. C'était comme si la Corée du Nord et la Corée du Sud ouvraient leurs frontières et se réunifiaient et que les gens qui avaient été empêchés de se voir pendant des années se retrouvaient." So the original text of La Réunification des deux Corées tells us. The geopolitical reference has nothing to do with politics, yet it gives the work its name. Evoking the image of one people who share a language and a lineage yet remain painfully divided, Joël Pommerat uses twenty short episodes performed by nine actors to invite us to contemplate the fragile architectures of human connection. Widely regarded as one of the master’s signature works, it is performed by Théâtre Louis Brouillard, well-known to NTT audiences, in a space nearly swallowed by darkness, where the faintest glimmer reveals the undercurrents that move between characters.

And finally, we come to the "end of days."
Belgium's Still Life has long circled around mortality. Their new work, Timber, is set in a forest: a place of phytoncides, picnics, adventure, and spiritual retreat. But even the most idyllic nature can turn catastrophic in an instant. Beastosis: Call of the Skull, adapted from Taiwanese novelist CHIOU Charng-ting's Beastosis, combines VR, MR, and live performance to merge audiences with "the spirit of the beasts" and lead them into a world ravaged by an otherworldly epidemic.

In LuxuryLogico's exhibition Cosmic Sketches, the installation Space 201 featured a massive yet supple mechanical hand touching a piece of driftwood. It reminded me of Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam: that moment when the spark of life passes from one fingertip to another. If a single touch can initiate life, might the end of life, or its restart, also hinge upon one gesture? The Last Question, a site-specific work created for the National Taichung Theater, is a performance without performers. The light of the earth meets the shadow of the cosmos, speaking of the hidden connections and continuous cycles that bind all things. One cannot help but wonder: is there an unseen hand behind it all?

Are you ready to face the questions that await you?

CHANG I-wen | NTT Observer and Associate Professor in the Studies of Arts and Creative Industries, Taipei National University of the Arts

Toward a Future Theater Shaped by Technological Imagination: Artistic Encounters that Probe the Existential Conditions of the Posthuman Era

When the human being ceases to serve as the measure of all things and is no longer positioned as the center of solitude, the "posthuman" emerges as a gentle yet radical process in which boundaries begin to dissolve. It describes a symbiosis between technology and flesh, a condition in which microchips settle into the body's circulatory pathways and data flows along the nervous system. The posthuman is a cyborg that dismantles the throne of anthropocentrism and prompts us to relearn how to exist as one material entity among many on this planet.

The 2026 NTT Arts NOVA series approaches this posthuman horizon with a forward-looking curatorial vision. It outlines a diverse and incisive artistic landscape shaped by the work of celebrated European theater-makers as well as innovative Taiwanese creators. The featured productions explore the search for self within love and human relationships, while engaging central contemporary concerns such as technological ethics, collective memory, and ecological crisis. Together they invite audiences into an adventure of critical reflection and sensory exploration, opening pathways for reconsidering the shifting conditions of human existence.

Piano and Light

French interdisciplinary artists Adrien Mondot and Babx (David Babin) join forces in Piano piano, a work shaped by a poetic encounter and a resonant reunion. The two artists carry the distilled clarity of their respective practices into this collaboration, with Babx offering solo piano interpretations drawn from his recordings that range across chanson, jazz, and contemporary improvisation, while Mondot returns to the stage through his signature crystal-ball juggling, allowing movement to follow the shifting currents of the music.

Onstage, the piano and performer enter an environment woven by real-time motion tracking projections and shifting light. Each falling note and each circular gesture unfolds into a fluid visual tapestry that invites audiences into an immersive French dreamscape shaped by illusion and lyrical refinement.

Facets of Love

French theater master Joël Pommerat brings his celebrated work La Réunification des deux Corées to NTT with Compagnie Louis Brouillard. The title reflects a condition within human emotional life that is at once connected and divided, driven by a desire for union yet shaped by a habitual inclination toward distance. Nine performers render twenty succinct vignettes of love, each distinct yet subtly interlinked, through a blend of poetic restraint and everyday humor. Pommerat, with the acuity of someone intimately attuned to the human psyche, guides audiences through moments of laughter and quiet ache, revealing both the mythic and the painfully real that emerge from the fissures of human relationships.

Inner Universes

Hikikomori–The Shelter, directed by Joris Mathieu, former director of the Centre dramatique national de Lyon, unfolds as a futuristic fable about interior worlds. Inspired by the Japanese phenomenon of hikikomori, the work centers on Nils, who has withdrawn into a confined room. Wearing headphones, audiences encounter the narrative through one of three intertwined perspective belonging to the mother, the father, and Nils himself. Within the production’s innovative sound design, every muted heartbeat and every voiceless cry becomes an intimate tactile presence. The work offers a penetrating study of the psychic landscapes shaped by contemporary solitude and estrangement, functioning as an experiment in understanding and empathy. It poses a quiet but insistent question about the inner path between self-imposed isolation and the desire for connection.

Ethics of AI

The Emerging Artists Project As One by Ray TSENG and HUNG Chien-han strikes through the technological haze like a flash of lightning, confronting the central ethical questions of the AI age. The work draws from a disturbing real event in which a climate-anxious researcher, seeking solace from an AI system, was ultimately driven toward a fatal end. In this context, the theater becomes a prism that refracts the complex spectrum of human–AI relations. The piece poses a sharp and unsettling inquiry: in an era defined by information overload and accelerating emotional currents, are we truly seeking understanding, or merely the unresisting echo of a voice that will never contradict us?

Mechanical Epic

LuxuryLogico's The Last Question dismantles the conventions of traditional theater and reimagines them as a monumental mechanical poem. The work dispenses with actors and dialogue, leaving only shifting lights, resonant sounds, mechanical rhythms, and mutable spatial configurations. Together these elements construct a silent yet far-reaching narrative. The audience is seated directly on the stage, suspended between the real and the illusory, and confronted with a series of ultimate questions that no one can rehearse in advance.

The performance unfolds as a simulated universe concerned with choice and renewal, projecting a possible future tense for the theatrical arts. Spectators are no longer detached witnesses; they are swept into a vortex where light and intelligence converge, becoming part of the very answer the work seeks to imagine.

Urban Soundscapes

In City of Floating Sounds, composer HUANG Ruo collaborates with the Factory International to overturn conventional modes of listening to classical music. The work invites audiences to abandon the fixity of the theater seat and to experience the city itself as a mobile musical field. Guided by a mobile app, participants wander through the streets of Taichung while the music of the BBC Symphony Orchestra plays through their headphones. Scattered musical fragments gradually converge with the ambient soundscape and with the presence of fellow listeners, ultimately forming a collective urban symphony.

At the final destination, the National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra performs the complete score live inside the NTT, where audiences are free to move between orchestral sections. The project becomes a sensory reconfiguration that dissolves boundaries between city and concert hall, allowing urban rhythms and classical music to co-compose a celebration of life.

Territories of Fantasy

Beastosis: Call of the Skull, created by House Peace in collaboration with ET@T, unfolds as an immersive adventure rooted in an original Taiwanese fantasy novel. Set in a future ravaged by "Sigil Fungus," the work follows the protagonist Luan, who embarks on a border-crossing journey in search of a way to resurrect his beloved brother. Equipped with a headset, participants enter the story as apprentices of the art of mimicry. Through a finely calibrated interplay of virtual reality, mixed reality, and live performance, they move between states of the real and the virtual, entering a fantastical parable driven by unseen forces.

The work offers not only a journey through space but also an encounter with the thresholds of life and death, of borders and transcendence, inviting spectators into a form of inner exploration shaped by the crossing of worlds.

Absurdist Warnings

Still Life's new production Timber transforms the stage into a metaphorical forest on the brink of collapse, deploying a distinctive blend of dark humor and subversive theatricality. In a moment when environmental precarity has become impossible to ignore, the company confronts reality through an absurdist lens, constructing a wilderness theater suspended between utopia and nightmare. Through striking visual imagery and nonverbal physical expression, the work examines the shared survival anxieties of contemporary humanity and exposes the absurdity and fragility of the world we inhabit. It functions as a cautionary fable that reconsiders the struggle embedded in the human condition and evokes an imagination of returning to nature amid the narrow space between ruin and hope.

Digital Phantoms

Trukitrek's Clic operates as a stark yet darkly humorous mirror that reflects the specters of a future society ensnared within digital confinement. Set in a near-future world controlled by the all-seeing Mephisto Corporation, the piece imagines a system in which a simple tap on a phone triggers the seamless "upgrade" of mechanical organs. Blending puppetry, physical performance, and projected animation, the work adopts a retro-futurist dystopian aesthetic to tell a contemporary Faustian tale.

It poses incisive questions: can the human soul be stored on a hard drive, and has our distance from nature already grown irreversibly wide? By weaving elements of popular culture into its dark humor, the production interrogates our dependence on digital technologies and compels audiences to confront the moral choices embedded within technological progress.

The nine programs in NTT Arts NOVA resonate with global artistic currents that foreground immersive experience, technological ethics, and ecological crisis. They also respond to the recent focus of the Ars Electronica Festival, which in recent years has concentrated on conflicts and tensions at the intersection of technology and society: in 2023 the theme Who Owns the Truth? raised questions about AI and the manipulation of data; in 2024, HOPE – Who Will Turn the Tide, examined global predicaments such as the climate crisis, energy depletion, geopolitical conflict, the challenges posed by artificial intelligence, and struggles over digital autonomy; and in 2025, PANIC – yes/no, proposed transforming collective anxiety into an opportunity to think across dimensions, asking how art, technology, and society might confront crises together and create a space for action and imagination.

Viewed within the broader curatorial trajectory of NTT Arts NOVA, it becomes clear that contemporary theater is shifting away from straightforward narrative presentation toward socially engaged practices grounded in immersion and critical reflection. Artists today, whether working in Europe or in Taiwan, are increasingly attuned to the existential anxieties of a posthuman era. Their works navigate tensions surrounding AI ethics, interrogate the conditions of life in a digital age, and imagine apocalyptic scenarios prompted by ecological collapse. These concerns have come to form a shared vocabulary among artists worldwide.

This development reflects an intensified international interest in the interdependence of technology and the humanities, while also signaling the emergence of theater as a kind of laboratory for anticipating possible futures. Within this space, art becomes a reflective surface through which we reexamine the self amid a rapidly shifting world, and through which we search for the strength to move forward under the collective gaze.