Twelve Rounds, One Day Before the Talk

Che-Yu's Opening Rough Structure (original text, 2026-09-02 08:5x)

• Core: the memory hidden in algorithms, humanism, and the AI era
• "How to define algorithmic art": algorithmic creation, 10 min
• "The embodiment of algorithmic art": immersive performance, 10 min
• "The sci-fi fast-forward of life in the AI era": Muse and personal AI systems, 10 min / a lifelong personal SSOT and Context / in this era, Talk is cheap, Code is cheap, Action is cheap, Continuous is hard
• "From individual to nation, building a living digital anthropology museum": Taiwan.md, 10 min
• Closing: stay aware, stay open, and then be happy

Promotional topics on the official site (already announced): "Redefining 'Design Perception': How AI Intervenes in Visual Creation and Interactive Art" / How can interactive experience design reconstruct the business boundaries of new media art? / Starting from Taiwan.md, building an AI-friendly environment for technology and the humanities.

Structure (finalized by Che-Yu at 09:5x; 40 minutes total, no Q&A, followed directly by NVIDIA's Yang Han-Hsuan)

Section	Minutes	Corresponding subtopic	One line (in his own words)
Opening	3	End of Subtopic C (the DNA animation)	Watching DNA animations in front of Discovery as a kid, one rule producing infinite species; dominoes, pinball machines, wooden building blocks
Algorithmic Art	8	Subtopic B	Algorithmic art is manipulating matter and rules to get a system running; memory is the substance of life itself
Embodiment	8	Subtopic C	Light, language as the condensation of memory, the void-sea of Soul Fish
Fast-Forward	8	Subtopic D	Friction goes down, I'm the head chef; Continuous is hard = coral's hard skeleton, even the sunlight you have to find yourself
Taiwan.md	8	Subtopic E	Expanding the range of what you care about from small to large; once memory gets squeezed into large language models we no longer own our own language; an anti-entropy structure
Closing	5	Subtopic F	Stay aware at all times, these are your most precious treasures, AI won't give them to you; we, as human beings, can finally wake up

The core throughline: memory → castle (the self) → coral (the shape of a life) → coral reef (the nation) → waking up. Design principle: ideas as the main thread, works as evidence.

Slide Format (finalized by Che-Yu at 09:5x)

• Keynote (the challenge this time). Each slide = one image (a screenshot or a video of a work) + one passage of text (an important concept or one line). Not too complicated: "I'd rather this story, my thinking, be presented properly."
• A cap of 40–50 slides.

Handling the Three Promotional Lines (Round 11)

• "Reconstructing the business boundaries of new media art": his answer is the trajectory of his work itself + his stance on brand collaborations. The trajectory of his work (he tells it this way in every talk): algorithmic art → P5 → solo show → wanting to coexist with AI → The Soul of Flowers at the Taoyuan Technology & Arts Festival (AI turning emotions into color swatches) → Soul Fish (the relationship between people and algorithms; detecting the color of the soul and turning it into a fish) → the residency in France (AI is the Rosetta Stone; building an ecosystem; a feedback loop between a distorted score and the musicians) → immersive concerts (Algorithmic Verses: The Boundary of Dreams and Solitude → the full version of The Eternal Garden in a Bottle) → one system holding all the elements, with poems written off to the side from a storyteller's point of view. All of these will be shown as videos.
• ⭐ His stance on brand collaborations: "If I'm specifically going to do something for someone else, I'm not especially happy. I'd rather it serve as an opportunity — this chance lets me take a work I want, a work I like, and happen to do a linked release, rather than doing something for a client. What I want more is: I make these things, and other people think they're great, so together we get this story told better, while also helping the other side — a win-win."
• "Starting from Taiwan.md, building an AI-friendly environment for technology and the humanities": the whole fourth section is exactly this.
• "Redefining Design Perception" (the main title) and the whole promotional outline: Che-Yu's call (a line he added at 09:5x): "I'll talk about my own thing, and not be too constrained by that topic's outline, because this is what I want to talk about." The title stays on the poster.

Subtopic A — Memory: Building a Castle in a Void World (the core; converged in Rounds 1–2)

• Arc: from "the most precious thing is what I've experienced, what I remember" → flipped into "it's how the world remembers you" → reading about the theory of plastic memory (every recollection gets rewritten), the self drifting like the Ship of Theseus, "a bit terrifying" → Muse follows up: "is building the machines fighting the drift, or accepting the drift?" → his answer: accepting it.
• ⭐ Che-Yu's own words, crystallized: "I've accepted that memory drifts; life is building a castle in a void world."
• ⭐ "We're born into a world with no foundation at all, and then the first thing that grows is the awareness of 'who am I' and 'where am I.' Then every single thing we've done gradually becomes a stone, embedded together with the original self. We are at once our own foundation and our own next stone."
• Memory's place in the AI era (Round 1): "my memory keeps compounding and stacking, like stocks or capital"; Muse and Taiwan.md = "a memory of memory and a machine of intelligence."
• Memory's place in performance (Round 1): Soul Fish = the shared memory of audience interaction; the piano diaries = memory-summoning, "linking the past and the future"; "turning memory from inside my own head into inside everyone's heads," setting everyone thinking of similar memories of their own.
• Links to: the 2026 thesis "from I to We" (2026-03-05 - Thinking - Craving the Present, and the Artist Who Is No Longer Alone); spectrum #14, memory reconstruction (USER.md).
• How the first section connects → Subtopic B.

Subtopic B — Algorithmic Art: Defining Rules to Set a System Running; Memory Is the Substance of Life Itself (Section One; converged in Rounds 3–4)

• Arc: Muse asks "inside the castle, what is algorithmic art?" → he first talks about the biggest change of the AI era (AI = a nervous system; things in the material world take shape according to human intention; AI takes control of information itself, reversing the direction of entropy, so that it can reverse entropy and grow at any time; tokens as a river, information self-organizing into a loop that keeps running like a waterwheel, a pump) → then gives the definition → Muse points out there's no "memory" in this section → he connects it.
• ⭐ Definition: "Algorithmic art is manipulating some of the world's matter and rules to form a system that can run." "Any curation is algorithmic art — curation, plus defining the rules. I define what kind of rules there are in this space, how it operates, and according to how I want this world to look or the state I prefer, I take this system and set it running." (= "anything that's a system is algorithmic art" from August 12; he recognized it himself)
• ⭐ Connecting memory: "Memory is the substance of life itself. After I've defined the rules, if no computation happens, no time passes, no state is produced, this system won't have its own history or evolution. It's like I've defined the castle and the world, but no new stones come in — then life itself is never born."
• The research he cited: time doesn't exist, it advances through entropy → Rovelli, The Order of Time, the thermal time hypothesis + Page–Wootters entanglement time (sources in Round 4).
• Links to: 2026-08-12 - Thinking - The Tide Theory and the P-Type's Steam Engine §3 (anything that's a system is algorithmic art).

Subtopic C — Embodiment: Light, Language, the Void-Sea of Soul Fish (Section Two; Round 5)

• Arc: Muse asks "if you could put up only one image to let them see memory going from my head into everyone's heads, which would it be?" → what he answers isn't one picture but three layers: light (using light to build a scene) → language (the condensed form of memory; intelligence is born only once symbols can be operated on) → scene (Soul Fish: a sea drifting in the void, a life of light condensing, algorithmic life condensing out of the audience's emotions and thoughts).
• ⭐ "Language, to me, is the condensed form of memory." Human civilization could develop because language accumulated symbols and the relationships between symbols; symbols can be operated on, like mathematical operations; "that's how intelligence was born — how to get the operating rules between things effectively preserved"; standing on the shoulders of giants.
• The mechanism of performing: "I first use language to bring everyone into the scene, and then through interaction, they actually feel the complete connection between the music and me and the space, and it's a bit like they've been dropped into what Foucault called a heterotopia." → Heterotopias — Michel Foucault
• ⭐ Favorite scene: "That Soul Fish passage — I really love this image of a sea drifting in the void, and then a life of light is condensing, and the condensing has to do with you too, kind of like the concept of algorithmic life condensing out of your emotions and thoughts."
• 🆕 He found the opening himself: "I think maybe this could be the opening of the talk, huh — then everyone would know why I ran off to do this, because as a kid I loved watching this stuff way too much" = as a kid, watching popular-science DNA animations in front of Discovery, playing with pinball machines and wooden building blocks, loving to watch little systems. DNA is one rule, yet it can vary into many species: "there's a big enough field of possibility inside this system — a bit like the concept of range and codomain in math — and its possibilities are big enough that it can produce something like randomness, but in combinations of infinitely many variants." (Matches the childhood material from the August 12 interview: pinball machines, folder hell.) Added in Round 6: dominoes, "slowly, slowly stack up the whole system, and then at the end watch the state of it being executed — it's a lot like the feeling of a program being compiled."

Subtopic D — Fast-Forward: Once Friction Goes Down, I'm the Head Chef, and the Works Are the Evidence (Section Three, Muse; Round 6)

• Arc: Muse asks "what is it that's fast-forwarding?" → he first talks about why things used to be slow (building systems and linking up his life both took a lot of effort; as a P type, he does something for a while, runs out of motivation, and stops; living in the moment, unable to make a complete plan, always in a rush; ideas live in the sea of chaos / primordial soup in his head, nourished by life, given shape by deadline pressure) → then talks about why he wanted to start from zero this time (see below) → and finally explains fast-forward.
• ⭐ The design principle of this talk (in his own words): "I have a finished, really, really big deck — my great accomplishments from back then up to now — but these things are my memory. After I talk through all that, other people might watch and think 'wow, so much cool stuff,' but what can they really take away? That's why I want to go through the transmission and passing-on of ideas, with my thinking as the main thread, and the things I've done as a kind of evidence, or a medium for explaining it. To really speak out my outlook on life, and help even more people in this era — whether you're doing design or engineering, we're all pursuing how to live more truly, and to live one hundred percent in the present in every moment, giving it everything."
• ⭐ Fast-forward = "once AI was born, all this organizing, connecting, judging — in the past, organizing a life's SSOT [editor's note: single source of truth], from relationships to my financial situation, to all the notes for my creative work, to all the files and data from my past, and also a lot of the cognitive debt around me, like the maintenance when doing a project, the upfront organizing of material — they've done it all for me, all of it; all I have to do is open my mouth. This actually let me break through the boundary of my old cognitive load: before, there was too much and it was too tiring, so I ended up not doing that many things; now every single thing has so little friction that I can properly think about what I actually want to do."
• ⭐ The picture: "Once all these starters are chopped, I'm the head chef — like I have a kitchen brigade, with lots of people prepping ingredients for me, and all I have to do is that final mixing, and tasting the flavors, slowly, slowly carving out my own imagination. It's a pretty enjoyable process — you get to properly cook your own life, with lots of people prepping for you."
• Links to: 2026-08-12 - Thinking - The Tide Theory and the P-Type's Steam Engine §2 (P types carry no original sin; the more P you are, the more you need a system); primordial soup = the "experimental + sprint" creative mode in USER.md; "standing on the shoulders of giants" (Round 5).
• Continuous is hard (converged in Round 7): Talk / Code / Action are all cheap, because going from having an idea to executing it is already frictionless. Continuous = coral: "coral grows; each one of them has a life that's short and fast, but the direction they choose, the place where they settle, and their collective strategy are what make up the colonies of coral reefs and the Great Barrier Reef."
• ⭐ "Continuous is me slowly confirming, through exploration, the direction I want; through constantly carrying out new experiments, exploring what succeeds, what fails just slightly, these edges of what's struggling. Once these edges are explored, they're like the hard skeleton of a coral reef — but this is the hard skeleton of your life, which is the shape of your life."
• ⭐ "We even have to find our own sunlight. After finding the sunlight, even though the sunlight's position may change — sometimes you discover it wasn't the sun, it was the moon — we still walk, stubbornly, toward the sunlight of the world we want. This process of walking is life itself."
• ⭐ Looping back to Subtopic A's castle: "We aren't defined by what we've done, but what we've done can let us walk to where we more want to go, and that's how this castle in the void can be built — a void road made of stones, letting us walk into other people's worlds, walk to what we imagine beauty looks like, or walk to a life we won't regret." (The castle grows from "the self" into "a road": leading to other people = from I to We)
• Links to: Taiwan.md — he was already calling it the "knowledge coral reef" on July 13 (2026-07-13 DesignBIZ Summit Alignment Meeting — Record and Analysis); "we even have to find our own sunlight" matches August 12's "the aimlessness of having resources but no direction" + the August 23 post "Happiness multiplied is still 0."

Subtopic E — From Individual to Nation: Expanding the Range of What You Care About, Keeping Heterogeneity Amid Homogenization (Section Four, Taiwan.md; Round 8)

• Arc: Muse asks "between one person's coral and a nation's coral reef, what's the step in between, and who is finding sunlight for Taiwan?" → he starts from "before 30 I never thought about my relationship with the nation" → cultivate the self, put the family in order, govern the state = expanding the range that consciousness monitors from small to large → growing up = treating the people you interact with every day as part of yourself → seeing the hard things (law, architecture, work) = the collective's sunlight → at this stage, wanting the nation, family, and friends all to be happy → the domain story → the threat of homogenization → the anti-entropy structure → the very first motivation.
• ⭐ "Put the family in order, cultivate the self, govern the state — it's slowly expanding the range that the individual's consciousness cares about and monitors, from small to large, to cover as much of the world's matter as possible. It's precisely because you see it as part of yourself that you care."
• ⭐ The domain: "From the moment I saw that domain hadn't been bought, I felt this thing absolutely had to at least be bought first, so it wouldn't be occupied by people who might mean us harm. After buying it, only then did I start thinking: in the AI era, how do I actually take — my memories of living in Taiwan are beautiful — these memories, and let more people know them? How do I get them preserved precisely, or contributed to collectively."
• ⭐ The threat: "Model competition is really intense right now; some big countries — their memory might, like the old concept of globalization, gradually swallow up these smaller cultural stories and perspectives. Once these memories get squeezed into large language models, we gradually no longer own our own language, our own memory, and our people. This is a homogenization of species and a homogenization of thought on a global scale. AI can help us execute fast, and a lot of homogenization will also happen at the same time, in this negative side effect."
• ⭐ The response: "In the new era, we need even more to keep our own heterogeneity — at the level of thought, our own perspective, what I care about or don't." "How can I, through these systems, build an anti-entropy structure, to turn the things I care about into a self-evolving structure that can protect everyone? Taiwan.md is an experiment and an answer I'm trying." (The things he hates = news that takes things out of context, online mobs, smearing, fragmented attention)
• The very first motivation: "Back when I was walking around abroad, a lot of people wanted me to introduce Taiwan, but all you'd be able to say is bubble tea or TSMC, that kind of thing. How do I actually have something that can synthesize all of Taiwan's information and thinking and cultural analysis, political commentary, and design aesthetics, all the topics, so I can see it and introduce it to others on a single endpoint and website, and even with versions in their languages."
• Links to: Subtopic B's "reverses entropy" (the individual's Muse is a machine that reverses entropy [逆熵], the nation's Taiwan.md is an anti-entropy [反熵] structure — the same word, 熵); _Taiwan.md Hub; the July 13 alignment meeting's "knowledge coral reef" and "sovereign Tower of Babel."
• Quotation (wording confirmed by him at 09:5x): "The essence of life is work; the real full-time job of life should be living well." Source not given.

Subtopic F — Closing: We, as Human Beings, Can Finally Wake Up (converged in Round 9)

• Arc: Muse asks "if 500 people could take away only one line, which would it be?" → he answers "stay aware at all times" → unfolding into a whole passage: what awareness takes in (the present, seeing yourself, stepping outside your fixed field of view, the matter around you, air, water, people's expressions, thoughts, instants of life, unforgettable memories) → why (these are the most precious treasures, and AI won't give them) → since execution and thinking can both be done for us by AI → wake up → what to do after waking up (spend time with the people you care about, make changes in the world with partners that come from our own will, be an open source contributor to the world) → getting free of money anxiety and the capitalist trap (money is only an illusion of value; it can only push things along, it can't buy the substance).
• ⭐ The one line to take away: "Stay aware at all times: awareness of the world in the present, of living in the present, to see yourself, to step outside your own fixed field of view, to feel all the matter around you, the air you breathe, the water you touch, the people around you, the detailed expressions on their faces, the things you're thinking in this moment, the thoughts running through each person's head, every instant of life, and the memories you can never forget. Because these are your most precious treasures; AI won't give you these things."
• ⭐ "Since in this era all execution and all thinking can be done for us by AI, we, as human beings, can finally wake up."
• ⭐ "We're like open source contributors to the whole world, open-source contributions making the world better."
• ⭐ "Money is just the world's illusion of value; it can be exchanged for some phenomena you want, but there are many more precious phenomena — health, relationships, work, happiness — that you can't buy with money; you can only use money to push these along, and only then can you see their true substance."
• The closing of the original structure, "stay aware, stay open, and then be happy," grows here into "awareness → waking up → living well."
• Links to: the 2026 thesis "density of the present" (SOUL); the August 23 post "Happiness multiplied is still 0"; the closing of the August 12 interview, "if people haven't become happier, something must have gone wrong somewhere"; the physics of wealth, "money is MP, not HP."

Round-by-Round Interview Record

Recording rules (set by Che-Yu at 09:0x, one more added at 09:1x): spoken words get only simple punctuation, no change to any wording or detail, kept exactly as said; every round of the conversation goes into this file. Proper nouns that speech recognition (ASR) clearly misheard get fixed (fixed so far: 忒修斯之船 Ship of Theseus / 媒介 medium / Taiwan.md / 靈魂魚 Soul Fish / 演算藝術 algorithmic art); anything that can't be made out keeps a ⚠️[ ] marker until he decides.

Round 1

MuseWhere did the word "memory" come from? When you wrote that line down, what was the first thing that came to mind?

Che-Yu

Memory, for me — I always used to think the most precious thing about this stretch of life I've lived was the things I've experienced, and my own remembering of them. And then later I slowly realized it's how the world remembers what you've done, whether that's through passively seeing the traces of what you've done, or through the memories of you that other people keep when they interact with you.

And then after that I read a theory that says every time a memory is recalled, it gets rewritten, re-edited one more time — it's an unstable medium, this state of the concept of plastic memory. And that felt a bit terrifying; I felt like maybe my self is like the Ship of Theseus too, and drifts like that as well.

And then, memory — later on I was thinking: in the AI era, why is it that once I started exploring, I was eventually able to make creative work and things that really belong to me, and my own whole system? It's because my memory keeps compounding and stacking, like stocks or capital. And that process became how I can keep taking what I borrow and making it me, or keeping the aesthetics and states I want and prefer, or things, or concepts, the logic of thinking. So I think in the AI era — I mean from now on into later — for example, with my own system and Taiwan.md, what I'm building is a memory of memory and a machine of intelligence.

And I think I'll add a bit in the middle: when I do algorithmic art performances — like the solo show and the one at Hongran [紅然, the operator of Huashan 1914 Creative Park, where Algorithmic Verses was staged], or what used to be concerts, and so on — I also hope it works through connectivity, meaning my audience, like with Soul Fish (靈魂魚) too: the audience, through the memory of interacting with this thing, a shared memory, forms a connection with it, so like Soul Fish has that connection too. And then, like when I'm performing, I'm actually taking that bunch of songs I wrote between 2022 and '24 — that bunch of piano pieces on my StreetVoice — and those are all my piano diaries. Once I've transformed the piano diaries into the form and melody I want to express, I then take them through something kind of like memory-summoning, so every time I play those pieces, I remember what I was doing then, what I was thinking, and what it felt like. It's a very subtle feeling of connection — linking the past and the future.

So in the moment when I'm performing, I'm actually taking everyone through a journey of my memory. When I tell everyone what the background of this song was — my thinking in a dream, my emotions by the sea, how I felt wandering around New York back then, or regrets about people and things that are very precious in my memory, and so on — once these memories are summoned up, they become a kind of fragment that can be told to, and resonate with, the collective, with everyone. So it's turning memory from inside my own head into inside everyone's heads, and then bringing these memories into their own heads, and when it gets into everyone's heads, it also sets everyone thinking about their own memories of similar emotions and feelings.

Round 2

MuseAre you building these machines to fight the drift of memory, or have you accepted the drift, and the machine just lets the rewriting leave a trace?

Che-Yu

I've accepted that memory drifts. Life is building a castle in a void world. We're born into a world with no foundation at all, and then the first thing that grows is the awareness of "who am I" and "where am I." Then every single thing we've done gradually becomes a stone, embedded together with the original self. We are at once our own foundation and our own next stone.

Round 3

MuseInside this castle, what is algorithmic art? Is it a stone, a way of building, or something else?

Che-Yu

And the way I see AI now — I think AI is like a nervous system. In the past, every thing in the material world was combined by humans or animals, or combined, changed, and affected by the forces of nature, and so became all kinds of phenomena: from nature, maybe mountain ranges, rivers; and then from, from the information industry and humans — from humans, maybe they made looms, a bunch of engines, cars, castles, and anyway a bunch of artifacts and buildings and so on, taking shape according to our intentions and the desires we have. And then in the next stage, AI takes control of information itself, so that information, which was, uh, gradually becoming chaotic, entropic, reverses direction — it becomes able to reverse entropy and grow at any time. So this changes the direction energy and rules flow in, and at any time you can use AI tokens as a river to let information form a self-organizing loop. So this self-organizing loop keeps running like a machine, like a waterwheel, a pump, right? Mm, and this is the structure we've built up in the world of AI. So this is what I think is the biggest change of the AI era.

And how do you define algorithmic art? I think algorithmic art is manipulating some of the world's matter and rules to form a system that can run. I remember mentioning this before, in the interview with them, their pre-event interview [the Shopping Design speaker interview on August 12, 2026]. So I think any curation, any curation is algorithmic art, and, um, curation, plus defining the rules, I guess. That is, I define what kind of rules there are in this space, how it operates, and then, according to how I want this world to look or the state I prefer, I take this system and set it running.

(Speech-recognition fixes: 防制機 → 紡織機 "loom"; 棒譜 → 幫浦 "pump")

Round 4

MuseWhere is memory in this section? Is entropy the same thing as "memory gets rewritten every time it's recalled"?

Che-Yu

Yeah, right, it's that "anything that's a system is algorithmic art" thing. And memory — I think in this section, memory is the substance of life itself. Because after I've defined the rules, defined the things, if no computation happens, no time passes, no state is produced in this system, then this system won't have its own history or evolution. It's a bit like I've defined the castle and the world, but the castle I just talked about has no new stones coming in, and they're not built in the right places, and nothing gradually accumulates — then life itself is never born.

And I saw a study before — can you help me find what this study actually is? It said: "Time doesn't actually exist; time gradually advances on the scale of entropy and disorder." Meaning, if there's no local state of entropy, then there's actually no time, so the timeline of the whole universe is really determined by the accumulation of states produced by quantum interactions between pieces of matter. So memory is life itself.

(Speech-recognition fixes: 站態 → 狀態 "state"; 傷 → 熵 "entropy"; 痊癒 → 全宇宙 "the whole universe")

Round 5

MuseIf this section could put only one image up on stage, to let 500 people see "memory going from my head into everyone's heads," what would that image be?

Che-Yu

I think the most important thing is light, I guess — I really love using light to build a scene. And as for memory, I think, like my speaking — the narration I say during a talk, or in the moment of a performance — at those times, I also feel language has this kind of power. Language, to me, is the condensed form of memory. The reason human civilization has been able to develop to where it is now is that language gradually accumulated every symbol, and the relationships between symbols. Symbols let us define things consistently and give them form, and then these symbols can be operated on, just like in the world of mathematics, where we can operate on and combine symbols through all kinds of operations and additions. So that's how intelligence was born — how to get the operating rules between things effectively preserved, and once they're effectively preserved, we can use operations on these symbols to keep the history of intelligence, and think and argue with other people, and build research and hypotheses, and also use these things to carry — standing on the shoulders of giants — the development of ideas.

So back to the piano, I mean the performing part: I think I use language, use music — music is also a kind of language, well, it seems a bit different, but anyway, when I'm performing music, I first use language to bring everyone into the scene, and then through interaction, they actually feel the complete connection between the music and me and the space, and it's a bit like they've been dropped into what Foucault called a heterotopia.

And my favorite scene would be something like the soul sea, or that Soul Fish passage — I really love this image of a sea drifting in the void, and then a life of light is condensing, and then slowly — and the condensing has to do with you too, kind of like the concept of algorithmic life condensing out of your emotions and thoughts. And I think the DNA of algorithmic life is also a part I absolutely love, because ever since I was little I've loved nature and science and DNA, so as a kid I'd be sitting in front of Discovery watching DNA animations all the time — there used to be a lot of those popular-science animations. I think maybe this could be the opening of the talk, huh — then everyone would know why I ran off to do this, because as a kid I loved watching this stuff way too much. And then as a kid, staying home by myself, I really loved playing with pinball machines and wooden building blocks, putting those together, but I'd feel like I preferred watching those little systems, and I also thought DNA was super cool. And because DNA is a rule, and it can also vary into lots of different species, it means there's a big enough field of possibility inside this system — a bit like the concept of range and codomain in math — and its possibilities are big enough that it can produce something like randomness, but in combinations of infinitely many variants.

(Speech-recognition fixes: 一直空間 → 異質空間 "heterotopia"; 質域 → 值域 "range")

(Corrected by Che-Yu on October 3: 某種音樂 "a kind of music" → 某種語言 "a kind of language")

Round 6

MuseWhat is it that's "fast-forwarding"?

Che-Yu

(First, a correction to Round 5: 「所以老師就會一直在 Discovery 前面看」 "so the teacher would always be watching in front of Discovery" → it's 小時候 "as a kid.")

As a kid I also really loved dominoes, because with dominoes too, I have to slowly, slowly stack up the whole system, and then at the end watch the state of it being executed — it's a lot like the feeling of a program being compiled.

And the sci-fi fast-forward of life, fast-forward — what I'm thinking is: before, building the computation of all these programs myself, and my system, and linking up everything in my life — all of this took a lot of effort. And on top of that I'm a P type [MBTI: perceiving], so it's easy for me to start something, do it for a while, feel no motivation, and just stop. And I can't make a complete plan; I'm always living in the moment, so everything's always a rush — like this talk, too, I only finished thinking all this through two days before. Of course, before the slides and the interview are born, they're all a sea of chaos in my head, a bit like primordial soup, but all I can do is nourish this primordial soup with my life, and then the primordial soup, through the pressure of meeting a deadline, lets me form the things and the story I want to tell.

And why I wanted to prepare from zero this time is also because I have a finished, really, really big deck — my great accomplishments from back then up to now — but these things are my memory. So after I talk through all that, other people might watch and think "wow, so much cool stuff," but what can they really take away? That's why I want to go through the transmission and passing-on of ideas, with my thinking as the main thread, and the things I've done as a kind of evidence, or a medium for explaining it. And to really speak out my outlook on life, and help even more people in this era — whether you're doing design or engineering, we're all pursuing how to live more truly, and to live one hundred percent in the present in every moment, giving it everything.

And fast-forward — I think what it means is: once AI was born, all this organizing, connecting, judging — in the past, organizing a life's SSOT [editor's note: single source of truth], or everything around me, from relationships to, say, my financial situation, to all the notes for my creative work, and then to all the files and data from my past, and also a lot of the cognitive debt around me, like some of the maintenance when I'm doing a project, or some of the upfront organizing of material — they've done it all for me, all of it, and they can do it really fast; all I have to do is next — just open my mouth, and that's it. And this actually let me break through the boundary of my old cognitive load: before, it was precisely because there was too much and it was too tiring that I ended up not doing that many things. But now every single thing has so little friction that I can properly think about what I actually want to do, and once all these starters are chopped, I'm the head chef — like I have a kitchen brigade, with lots of people prepping ingredients for me, and all I have to do is that final mixing, and tasting the flavors, slowly, slowly carving out my own imagination. It's a pretty enjoyable process — you get to properly cook your own life, with lots of people prepping for you.

(Speech-recognition fixes: 施政 → 實證 "evidence"; 微運 → 維運 "maintenance")

Round 7

MuseFor you, what is continuous? Why is it still hard?

Che-Yu

I think... Talk, Code, and Action are all cheap, because going from having an idea to executing it has become frictionless. So what's next is like — how do living things survive on Earth? If you fast-forward these timelines, coral grows; each one of them has a life that's short and fast, and then, but the direction they choose, the place where they settle, and their collective strategy are what make up the colonies of coral reefs and the Great Barrier Reef. So continuous is me slowly confirming, through exploration, the direction I want, and then, for this direction I want, through constantly carrying out new experiments, exploring what is... what succeeds, what fails just slightly, these edges of what's struggling, and once these edges are explored, they're like the hard skeleton of a coral reef — but this is the hard skeleton of your life, which is the shape of your life. And then we keep walking toward the direction we want, where there's sunlight. That sunlight might be different for everyone, but this sunlight can — the existence of this sunlight is also why we're alive, because besides eating and reproducing, humans still need some other purpose, right? So in the process of people thinking about why they're alive, we even have to find our own sunlight. And after finding the sunlight, even though the sunlight's position may change — sometimes you discover it wasn't the sun, it was the moon — we still walk, stubbornly, toward the sunlight of the world we want, and this process of walking is life itself. So we aren't defined by what we've done, but what we've done can let us walk to where we more want to go, and that's how this castle in the void can be built — a void road made of stones, letting us walk into other people's worlds, letting us walk into other people's worlds, walk to what we imagine beauty looks like, or walk to a life we won't regret.

(Speech-recognition fixes: 大寶礁 → 大堡礁 "Great Barrier Reef"; 羣 → 群 "colony" (variant character))

Round 8

MuseBetween one person's coral and a nation's coral reef, what's the step in between? Who is finding sunlight for Taiwan?

Che-Yu

From individual to nation — I think before 30 I never really thought about what my relationship with the nation was. Because it's the same with the process of a person growing up, right: the old saying goes, first cultivate yourself, then govern the state — so, put the family in order, cultivate the self, govern the state — the idea is to slowly, slowly expand the range that the individual's consciousness cares about and monitors, from small to large, to cover as much of the world's matter as possible. And it's precisely because you see it as part of yourself that you care. So growing up is: you can take care of yourself, and then you, this thinking individual, discover that your own body is actually not only related to yourself — so many of your things are closely tied to society and the environment. You start learning to treat the people you interact with every day as part of you, and to, to interact with them well, and let them be happy and thrive too — not necessarily taking care of them, maybe through all kinds of ways to be with, to be with them, to go on adventures together, and to live together. And then you also learn to see some harder things, like law, architecture, or the work around us — these are things our collective is doing, and collective kinds of sunlight or goals. Even though capitalist society controls everyone really tightly, and it's hard to transcend this financial thinking to let yourself do what you want to do, these goals are at the same time what you start using to think about these things at the size of an organization. If it's part of my self, how do I care about these things?

So I think, now that I've reached this stage, having gone through starting a company, gone through lots of personal creative exploration, and gone through all kinds of countries, I've found that I really want my own country, and people, and family, friends, the people around me, to all be happy, and to be able to increasingly do what they want to do, and not be talking about money, goals, work every day — there are far, far more important things in life than these, right? I once heard a line: "The essence of life is work; the real full-time job of life should be living well." Like that.

So during this stretch of the nation's coral reef, I was thinking — from the moment I saw that domain hadn't been bought, I felt this thing absolutely had to at least be bought first, so it wouldn't be occupied by people who might be — toward us, who might mean us harm. We bought — after I bought it, only then did I start thinking: "In the AI era, how do I actually take our Taiwan's — I mean, my memories of living in Taiwan are beautiful — how do I let more people know these memories? How do I get them preserved precisely, or contributed to collectively, and not be by the era's..." Like, because model competition is really intense right now, some big countries — their memory might, like the old concept of globalization, gradually swallow up these smaller cultural stories and perspectives. Once these memories get squeezed into large language models, we gradually no longer own our own language, our own memory, and our people. This is a homogenization of species and a homogenization of thought on a global scale. AI can help us execute fast, and a lot of homogenization will also happen at the same time, in this negative side effect. So in the new era, we need even more to keep our own heterogeneity — at the level of thought, our own perspective, what I care about or don't, how I want to help my life and other people's lives. And then if it's about heterogeneity, I mean, at the individual level, is it like this? And then at the level of the nation, of my hometown, is it that I really want to do something for my own home? One thing I used to hate most was news reports that take things out of context, or online mobs attacking people and things; and on the other hand I also hate smearing, or this kind of information that's too one-sided, attention that's been fragmented. So how can I, through these systems, like I just said, build an anti-entropy structure, to turn the things I care about into a self-evolving structure that can protect everyone? And I think Taiwan.md is an experiment and an answer I'm trying. And I want to use Taiwan.md to build a knowledge base, and at the same time I go with — give it to foreigners, because honestly, back when I was walking around abroad, a lot of people wanted me to introduce Taiwan, but all you'd be able to say is bubble tea or TSMC, that kind of thing. So how do I actually have something that can synthesize all of Taiwan's information and thinking and cultural analysis, political commentary, and design aesthetics, all these topics, so that I can see it and introduce it to others on this single endpoint and website, and even with versions in their languages. I think that's the very first motivation.

(Speech-recognition fixes: 反傷 → 反熵 "anti-entropy"; 一直化／一直 → 異質化／異質 "heterogeneity / heterogeneous"; 羣體 → 群體 "collective" (variant character); 台灣.md → Taiwan.md. 「那我到底要怎麼有一個可以綜合所有台灣的資訊跟思考跟文化分析」 "So how do I actually have something that can synthesize all of Taiwan's information and thinking and cultural analysis" was repeated three times by speech recognition and has been merged into one.)

Round 9

MuseHaving gone all the way around, if 500 people could only take away one sentence, which one would it be?

Che-Yu

(First, word fixes: 跟著狀 → 跟茁壯 "and thrive"; 正值 → 正職 "full-time job.")

If we go all the way around, I'd hope what everyone takes away is to stay aware at all times, I guess: awareness of the world in the present, of living in the present, to see yourself, to step outside your own fixed field of view, to feel all the matter around you, the air you breathe, the water you touch, the people around you, the detailed expressions on their faces, the things you're thinking in this moment, the thoughts running through each person's head, every instant of life, and the memories you can never forget. Because these are your most precious treasures; AI won't give you these things. And since in this era all execution and all thinking can be done for us by AI, we, as human beings, can finally wake up. We can wake up from the dull, tedious, repetitive labor of daily life, or from automated behavior — letting everything be thrown to, I mean, letting every cognitive obstacle and all the load be thrown to AI to handle, to machines to handle — and then we can really live well. We can truly spend good time with the family and friends we care about, and with the co-founders we like, go make some interesting changes in the world that come from our own will. We're like open source contributors to the whole world, open-source contributions making the world better. And I also hope everyone can get free of money anxiety and the trap of capitalist society, I guess. I mean, we — it has to run, but the more people get free, the more people get free of the trap, you can wake up and transcend these things to think. I mean, money is just the world's illusion of value; it can be exchanged for some phenomena you want, but there are many more precious phenomena — like what a lot of people have talked about, health, relationships, work, happiness — these are things you can't buy with money; you can only use money to push these along, and only then can you see their true substance. That's about it.

(Speech-recognition fixes: 夻見 → 看見 "see"; 「那既然現在這個時代⋯被 AI 代勞了」 "And since in this era... can be done for us by AI" was repeated twice and 「你只能用錢去推動這些，才能夠」 "you can only use money to push these along, and only then can" was repeated three times; each has been merged into one.)

Round 10

MuseOpening, four sections, closing — what order, and how many minutes each? (40 minutes, no Q&A)

Che-YuMost precious treasures (word fix: 保障 → 寶藏 "treasure"). Opening 3 min, algorithmic art 8, embodiment 8, fast-forward 8, Taiwan.md 8, closing 5. → Entered into the "Structure" table at the top of the file [on this page: the "Structure" table near the top].

Round 11

MuseThe three lines on the official site (design perception / business boundaries / AI friendly) — how are you going to handle them on stage?

Che-Yu

And, for this talk's slides I want to challenge myself to make them in Keynote, and each slide is, as much as possible, an image plus a paragraph of text — it can be a screenshot or a video of a work, and or a paragraph of text, I mean some important concept or one line. Like that — I don't want it to be too complicated; I'd rather this story, my thinking, be presented properly, so as a cap I figure it can go up to around 40 or 50 slides.

And then the conceptual-level question, reconstructing the business boundaries of new media art — I think for these performances and things I've explored, I'll still play videos for everyone. Like France, it's from what I started doing back then — if you look at the records of my past talks, I always talk about how I started from algorithmic art, did P5, did the solo show, and then after the solo show, I started feeling that I wanted AI, this thinking, and how to coexist with AI, so there's The Soul of Flowers (花的靈魂) at the Taoyuan Technology & Arts Festival, and it has, I mean, AI converting emotions into color swatches. And Soul Fish is the relationship between people and algorithms, detecting the color of the soul and converting it into a fish. And then next is, next is the residency in France, where AI is that Rosetta Stone, and how I built an ecosystem, and a feedback loop between a distorted score and the musicians. And then after that, we did these few immersive concerts, from Algorithmic Verses: The Boundary of Dreams and Solitude (he said 孤寂與夢境的邊界) to what we did, to the full version of The Eternal Garden in a Bottle (永恆的瓶中花園), like that, and then it became a system that holds all the different elements, and we've made so many things too, constantly writing poems off to the side from a storyteller's point of view. This, I think, is the business boundary of new media art.

And actually we've done a lot of crossover co-branding and collaborations with brands, and for us, I hope — I mean, taking on commissions wears me down; I mean if I'm specifically going to do, do something for someone else, I'm not especially happy. I'd rather it serve as an opportunity — this chance lets me take a work I want, a work I like, and happen to do a linked release, rather than doing something for a client. What I want more is: I make these things, and other people think they're great, so together we get this story told better, while also helping the other side — a win-win.

And I think Taiwan.md is the second one I just mentioned — we have a section that's specifically about Taiwan.md, the whole thing fits this topic, unless you think there's something missing — I can add more for you, you can ask me.

(Speech-recognition fixes: 住村 → 駐村 "residency"; 羅賽塔 → 羅塞塔 "Rosetta" (variant transliteration); 圍圈 → 迴圈 "loop"; 平中花園 → 瓶中花園 "garden in a bottle"; 台灣.md → Taiwan.md; 上線 → 上限 "cap". 「我們也做了這麼多件東西」 "we've made so many things too" was repeated three times and has been merged into one.)

(Corrected by Che-Yu on October 3: 結案結得 "wrapping up projects" → 接案接得 "taking on commissions")

Round 12

MuseOf the five videos in embodiment, which ones are evidence, and which ones are memory?

Che-Yu

These videos are the substance of memory, you know. I mean, although I don't think we need to make a point of emphasizing what I've done [per Che-Yu's clarification; the transcript reads 要 "need to"], it's that I laid out my path, stone by stone, and that's how they're able to get to the state I'm thinking in now.

And hey, can you also put together a list for me of the materials I can use — these. I remember there should be videos for all of them, but the videos need some finding, though for The Soul of Flowers there's pretty much only one ⚠️[知識的 "of knowledge" → 直式的 "vertical"?] on IG, so don't go searching yet, okay — just take a look for me first. I remember the residency — the version in France — and The Eternal Garden in a Bottle both have a showcase video, and The Border of Dream and Solitude also has a concert release video. As for the others, I'll probably have to slowly, slowly gather and hunt down material, so take a look in my Drive for me and survey all the usable videos and images, but don't spend too much effort — just let me get a rough idea of what's there first, because I want to make a — anyway, you understand my goal.

(Speech-recognition fixes: 柱村 → 駐村 "residency"; 屏中 → 瓶中 "in a bottle"; 編輯 → 邊界 "border"; 花了靈魂 → 花的靈魂 "The Soul of Flowers")

🫧 Muse's Observations (wrapping up the conceptual layer, 10:0x)

• Twelve rounds, ten questions, zero crystallized lines from Muse. The opening (the DNA animation) is something he stumbled onto himself in Round 5; the design principle (ideas as the main thread, works as evidence) is something he said offhand in Round 6; "waking up" grew out of Round 9. The July 13 outline was written by Muse and talked about the trajectory of his work; this one was spoken by him and talks about memory. Put the two side by side, and the difference is exactly what he asked for: "that way it stays my thinking, my talk."
• The same word shows up on two levels: at the individual level, Muse is a machine that "reverses entropy" (逆熵, Round 3); at the national level, Taiwan.md is an "anti-entropy" (反熵) structure (Round 8). He didn't line them up on purpose; it's the same mind naturally using the same word. This is the hardest seam in the whole talk; the fast-forward section and the Taiwan.md section can be joined by it.
• Two tensions left on the wall (no verdict; it's his stage):
  1. In Round 11 he said of brand collaborations, "doing something for someone else, I'm not especially happy; I'd rather it serve as an opportunity, a linked release." The 500 people in the audience are precisely brand decision-makers. The line is true, and it's also his stance; how to say it without falling into the "overbearing" box (SOUL §neither servile nor overbearing: give evidence, not verdicts) is a matter for the stage.
  2. The 8 minutes of embodiment holds five videos plus three conceptual layers, and he decided to keep all of it ("the videos are the substance of memory"). This is the spot that ballooned in each of the past four talks; tonight's 19:30 rehearsal is the only gate that will actually ring, and reminders in documents have already proven ineffective (the fourth time on the evolution baseline).
• Promotional topics: he decided, "I'll talk about my own thing." The four characters of "design perception" (設計感知) go unaddressed for the whole talk and stay on the poster; "business boundaries" is answered with the trajectory of his work + his stance; "AI-friendly environment" = the fourth section.
• Materials: the finished videos are nearly all on YouTube (the master index of work materials); what's missing is the opening three minutes (the DNA animation, dominoes, pinball machines) and video of Unfinished Bloom.

Open Questions (to dig into next time)

• How do the 5 minutes of closing get from Taiwan.md (the nation) back to "waking up" (the individual)? He hasn't talked through the step in between yet.
• Where do the visuals for the opening three minutes come from: should the Discovery DNA animation be an illustrative stand-in, or should the original footage be tracked down?
• Who said "The essence of life is work; the real full-time job of life should be living well"?
• Should "design perception" appear even once, on any slide?