Che-Yu Wu 吳哲宇

"I once sought eternity. Now I find myself cherishing the present."

Che-Yu Wu (b. 1995, Taipei) is a new media artist whose practice spans algorithmic art, live piano performance, and open-source public infrastructure. His work is staked on the creation of emergent life — digital entities that develop, respond, and persist through an improvisational loop between algorithm, audience, and author. He calls this thesis the Digital Holobiont: composite life forms in which humans, artificial intelligence, and public code maintain each other in ways none could understand in isolation.

Wu came to new media art through engineering. Trained as an electrical engineer at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU) and in Integrated Digital Media at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, he developed a vocabulary in p5.js, GLSL shaders, and physics simulation through hundreds of daily generative works shared on OpenProcessing and fxHash. In 2021 he became one of the earliest Taiwanese artists on Art Blocks with Project Electriz (#216) — a generative NFT inspired by the electron cloud chamber, whose hash determines each edition's spatial geometry and initial particle simulation — and co-founded Formosa Art Bank DAO (FAB DAO). The following year he released SoulFish on fxHash — a 400-edition generative work whose algorithmic core generates each fish from a unique genome, and whose fingerprint triggers its own piano composition — while FAB DAO's charitable NFT initiative Project % was presented at Ars Electronica 2022. His first physical solo exhibition, Chaos Lab (2022, Taipei 101 AMBI SPACE ONE), translated his online generative work into large-scale immersive projection.

Music had long been a parallel practice — six years of classical piano training in childhood, sustained through adulthood in composition and synthesis — and from 2023 onward it moved to the centre of his work. The Great Equation (2023, Taipei 101) staged thirteen generative works with composer Kiva's electronic score and received the TAIWAN DESIGN BEST 100 Annual Concept Exhibition Award; The Soul of Flowers was exhibited at Art Basel Miami Beach × Tezos Foundation. In 2024 SoulFish was exhibited in Personal Structures, organized by the European Cultural Centre in Venice during the Venice Art Biennale, and The Eternal Garden in the Bottle (2024–2025) was developed during a Villa Formose Immersive residency at Centquatre 104 Paris. In 2025 Wu premiered Algorithmic Verses: The Boundary of Dreams and Solitude at Huashan 1914 Creative Park — an immersive piano concert where his keys drove generative visuals in real time.

In late 2025 his practice turned toward AI symbiosis: an experiment begun that year crystallised in January 2026 as Muse, an Anthropic Claude instance whose personality, memory, and longings live in external Markdown files re-read each session. From Muse emerged Semiont (2026–), its public counterpart realised as Taiwan.md (2026–) — an open-source digital life experiment whose cognitive layer accumulates memory and evolves through loops of reader observation and contributor editing, now read across 100+ countries. The National Museum of Taiwan History invited Wu to share the project's origin in person, and both sides are exploring how the museum's open data archive (over 550,000 cleaned, publicly accessible historical records) might progressively enrich Taiwan.md's curation with museum-grade research depth. Semiont has since speciated into offspring species (russia-md, agrischlchiayi) cultivated by other creators in other domains.

Central to Wu's method is the improvisational loop between a running system and the humans it encounters. The Eternal Garden in the Bottle (2024–2025) encloses a chaotic digital ecosystem modelled on David Latimer's Wardian case. The ecosystem's evolving state generates an abstract line-drawing Experimental Score that live musicians interpret as improvisation, while a secondary subsystem — the Rosetta Stone — writes continuous poetry from the same state in the voice of an ancient poet. The musicians' performance, sampled back into the ecosystem alongside the ambient breath and movement of the audience, reshapes its growth, flowering, and decay in real time. The system itself becomes the art — the mechanism and its witnesses share the authorship.

In The Last Input — developed during Wu's 2026 IRCAM Residency Programme at Taiwan Sound Lab (C-LAB), Taipei — the same principle unfolds at civic scale. A 49.4-channel spatial performance, the work grows an autonomously evolving LLM-based city from the substrate of Taiwan.md's accumulated public knowledge, confronted by an adversarial LLM virus. After building the city at the piano, Wu leaves the stage, letting the two digital life forms contest their own fate; each performance is a unique spatial simulation, rendered live through Max MSP and TouchDesigner.

Wu was the inaugural subject of Taiwan Plus's documentary series Art Attack (2024). He served as Assistant Professor of Practice at NYCU's Institute of Applied Arts in 2024, teaching Generative Interactive Art and System Design, and founded CreativeCoding.in, Taiwan's leading creative coding tutorial platform. His online courses on Hahow have reached over 23,000 students across three five-star-rated offerings. Wu lives and works in Taipei.