The Boundary of Dreams and Solitude

At Huashan the piano was a hired acoustic grand with no MIDI to connect, so the images listened to the microphones going into the mixing desk. TouchDesigner split the sound into low, mid and high bands, kick and snare hits, rhythm, spectral centroid and the rise and fall of volume, and wired them to each scene’s own parameters: in the first scene the period of the light circles follows the low end and the turbulence follows the volume; in the fireworks, the stronger the mids, the more particles are born at once; in the kaleidoscope, each snare hit blows a gust of wind.

Each of the twenty scenes was drawn on a square canvas of five thousand by five thousand pixels, unfolded into a net with the floor at the centre and the four walls folded outwards, cut into five surfaces and sent in five NDI streams to the venue’s projection system. The scene changes were his: one button per scene on an APC40 controller, the picture dipping to dark for about four seconds at each change, faders for the overall brightness and the stage light, and another set of faders bringing cicadas, waves, birds and rain into the speakers. The heaviest shared component, used in eleven places, was the GPU particle system from TouchDesigner’s Palette, made by Markus Heckmann.

The piano at both performances was Che-Yu Wu. Minnie Wang (王敏玲) on strings, 謝佩穎 on percussion and sound, and Jen Ni Chang on handpan, guitar and harmonica came in and out by piece: the handpan joined in 話語 (Words), guitar and harmonica in The Wheel of Time, and from 日出召喚 (Call of the Sunrise) onwards the percussion and strings came in. Five of the pieces, Call of the Sunrise, 致飛鳥的遺憾 (Regret for the Flying Birds), 轉瞬即逝 (Fleeting), 陽光下的回籠覺 (Back to Sleep in the Sun) and 克勞德 (Claude), began as improvised recordings he made with Minnie Wang in December 2023. The percussion included a bass drum, a dropped cymbal, a zarb, crotales, an ocean drum, brushes, shaker bells and a rain stick. In the fourth chapter, in 夜沙火語 (Whispers of Sand and Fire), the piano stopped, the ocean drum moved across the room, and he spoke. After the first night, the production team said the moment they remembered most was the sea scene: the piano falls silent and lets the sound of the waves come through.

In the improvisation of the last chapter, the dreams written by the audience rose line by line onto the four walls and he played as he read them. At the end he introduced each of the players, and at the second performance he called the whole room together for a group photo during the bows.

Two days after the second performance, in his notes to the team, he wrote what to change next time: “Beyond particle systems, use more elements with form or real-world texture, such as wood grain, stone and figurative shapes, for more depth and contrast.” On 3 September the same performance was given again at Trendy Taipei in AMBI SPACE ONE, Taipei 101, and on 16 September it was edited into an English film, The Boundary of Dreams and Solitude.

On 31 July 2026, at the opening of Le Méridien Taipei Banqiao, the series’ hotel version, Algorithmic Verses: The Meridian of Light, grew twenty-four scenes out of the same system, played on piano, violin, percussion, and guitar and handpan, its five chapters running from the first faint light of a newborn universe to the snow and sea of five in the morning. The audience was not bound to one seat: they could sit, get up and wander, or lean into a corner with their eyes closed.