Installation2026

The Last Input — Before the End

The City act: towers fed by chords rise on the wireframe terrain as the camera slowly circles. Rendered live by the performance system, no post-production.Muted loop

Contents & work details

Archive year: 2026
Type: Installation
Artist: Che-Yu Wu 吳哲宇
Latest: The C-LAB Sound Off version: preparing the performance (rehearsal, 19 October 2026)
Premiere: 4 July 2026, C-LAB, Taipei
Showcase: 22 to 24 October 2026, C-LAB (two performances and a post-show talk on 24 October)
Sound field: 49.4-channel spatial sound field (49 surround speakers and 4 subwoofers)
Medium: Piano and controller input, a live-computed digital world, sixteen MIDI tracks, spatial harmony
Residency: 2026 IRCAM Sound Off: emerging artist residency
Presented by: C-LAB × Taiwan Sound Lab
Co-presented by: IRCAM–Centre Pompidou, France
Supported by: Ministry of Culture, Taiwan
Performance photography: 林亞蓁, commissioned by C-LAB

Original page & interactive experience

Overview

The Last Input is an immersive sound performance built around the act of letting go. It asks what meaning remains in the last input a human presses by hand, at a time when artificial intelligence can generate everything.

Dressed in a white lab coat as a mad scientist of creation, the artist uses a piano and controllers to feed sound and parameters into a world within a 49.4-channel spatial sound field. Land is born; plants and strange creatures sprout one after another; then two rival AI species appear: the City, which keeps building upward in an attempt to hold order, and the Virus, which keeps spreading, mutating and eroding.

Both are driven by language models; they remember, learn and make their own decisions. Order is built again and again, and again and again it is scattered by chaos, while new life also grows out of that chaos. Civilisation evolves through this cycle of failure and rebuilding, like a cosmic clock ticking forward one notch at a time as entropy rises.

When the last input is pressed, the artist takes off the white coat and withdraws to become an observer. From then on the organic workings of this world, its survival and its collapse, are handed back to its own chaos, heading somewhere not even its maker can foresee.

Two kinds of input

Two kinds of input drive the work. The knobs on the lab desk set the laws by which this world runs: humidity, wind speed, and the speed at which time flows. The keys of the electric piano throw variables into the world: a single note plants a seed, and a chord calls up a flock of birds or raises the City by another storey. Harmony also decides the fortunes of this world. Consonant chords make the City prosper, while dissonance builds up, little by little, into decay, until the Virus seeps in from the edge.

Chaos and life

Che-Yu Wu has been fascinated by simulating and computing ecosystems since childhood. As he sees it, life is born out of chaos: only when a world has gathered conditions complex enough, with order and disorder pulling at each other again and again, can something that breathes and multiplies emerge. The work brings this process into performance. The moment the Virus is born, and the direction it spreads from, are decided entirely by the conditions the world has gathered by itself, and which note set off the chain reaction can never be traced back afterwards.

“What fascinates me is this: once my system is built, if it produces some complexity or behaviour beyond me, then that thing is the work itself. So I simply designed it into the theatre. Halfway through I say, I give up control; whatever happens next, I watch it as an observer.”

Che-Yu Wu, interview, August 2026 (revised by the artist, October 2026)

Species6

The herd. Horses graze, ants crawl through the grass, and the elephant walks slowest and lives longest. Ground creatures hatch beside plants; more plants, more animals.

Flocks. One chord calls up a flock; they fly together and now and then dive for something small on the ground.

Plants. A single note lands as one plant, and its velocity sets the size; fourteen kinds, from low grass to blossoming trees, grown by one set of rules.

The City. Chords feed the buildings and the towers stack floor by floor; every tower has a sound of its own as it grows.

The Virus. Once dissonance builds past the threshold, the first virus seeps in from the edge and begins to spread, mutate and attack.

After letting go. The performer stops; the two species fight on by their own rules to the end.

Things really live in this world. Every tile is rendered live by the performance system: the same playing gives the same picture; different playing, a different world.

The plant act1

The terrain after a few dozen seeds and a handful of chords: grasses, blossoming trees, flocks, horses and an elephant, each going about its life on the same wireframe land.

The performer in a white coat at the piano, a golden city on the wall — White coat, piano, golden city. Photography: 林亞蓁, commissioned by C-LAB

On stage

The performance opens with the artist in a white lab coat at the piano, watching the world he has created with a researcher's curiosity. He plays a few notes, new creatures appear on the land, and he pulls the camera closer so the whole room can watch: a horse lowering its head to drink, small insects darting through the grass. When laughter rises from the audience he lets the image linger a little longer, and in that moment everyone in the room is watching a world being born.

On site, premiere, 4 July 202620

The Last Input premiere: Before the start, the room is full

The Last Input premiere: In place, lights down

The Last Input premiere: The genesis terminal: a world born from a line of commands

The Last Input premiere: The hum of genesis: the first light

The Last Input premiere: Terrain carved out of white noise

The Last Input premiere: The blue-white wireframe land

The Last Input premiere: Land and climate: the first plants

The Last Input premiere: A burst of green

The Last Input premiere: The first seed is played

The Last Input premiere: The golden City fills the wall

The Last Input premiere: Between the desk and the piano

The Last Input premiere: Head down, listening to the world

The Last Input premiere: The stacking of civilisation

The Last Input premiere: The City at full height

The Last Input premiere: The City at its brightest

The Last Input premiere: Watching the world he made

The Last Input premiere: The end: the audience in red light

The Last Input premiere: Post-show talk: the ten residency groups and the mentors

In performance order: before the start, the genesis terminal, creation, terrain, plants, the City, the end; the last two are the post-show talk and the group photo. Photography: 林亞蓁, commissioned by C-LAB. Click any image to enlarge.

The premiere in full, 4 July 2026 (with sound)566s

The sixth piece of the C-LAB Sound Off workshop showcase. Video: C-LAB.

Audio-Visual Audio

Most audiovisual performances begin with the image and then set sound to it; this work reverses the order. The artist first uses musical performance to build a living simulated world, and the sound is what that world naturally makes as it runs: a horse makes a drinking sound only when it reaches the water, and the City roars only once it has grown tall. He calls this logic Audio-Visual Audio: the playing gives rise to the world, and the world then joins the performance with its own voice.

Genesis terminal1

The boot sequence, 38 seconds, silent loop.

The performance begins with a line of commands: the terminal boots, allocates a 22 by 22 terrain lattice, connects the 49.4-channel speaker array, then waits for hands. At the end the same wireframe cube is drawn once more.

Six acts in the premiere version: every performance is one evolution6

01
Genesis
- The hum of genesis: noise carves the first light
- First life: one geometric bird, the signature tone
PerformerTurns a knob; the land rises
WorldTerrain grows out of white noise
02
Terrain
- Land and climate: relief, ruggedness, day, rain, wind
- The first seed: from the desk to the piano
PerformerPresses the first key
WorldA single note lands as a plant
03
City
- The stacking of civilisation: chords feed buildings
- The richer the harmony, the taller the city
PerformerImprovises, desk and piano in turn
WorldFlocks, beasts, towers stack upward
04
Virus war
- Virus birth: corruption crosses a threshold
- Panic and rescue: consonance heals
PerformerPlays faster, trying to save the city
WorldThe virus spreads, mutates, attacks
05
Letting go
- The Last Input: the final input
- Autonomy: a ladder war between two species
- The virus speaks
PerformerStops giving input; withdraws to observe
WorldThe system runs itself; the outcome is computed
06
Survivors
- Darkness and silence
- Epilogue: something outside the cycle
PerformerListens with the audience
WorldSomething has survived

Order: the City
Chaos: the Virus
Outside the cycle
Brighter frames are the three signature moments

From the premiere to October

The Last Input premiered on 4 July 2026 at the C-LAB Sound Off workshop showcase, in a version of about ten minutes. For the October showcase the work expands into a full version of about twenty minutes, with its sound redesigned by KIVΛMKII; two performances and a post-show talk take place on 24 October.

Key visual

Ahead of the October 2026 showcase, the work was given its own wordmark and key visual. The key visual draws one complete run of the world by itself: the system's built-in simulated performer plays the score through to the twentieth minute, and the state of the world is logged every second. The cover is the world as the work itself renders it, stopped at 16:33 just after the last input, cut isometrically into a 22 × 22 block whose two elevations are strata of time. The same data is then drawn as five companion sheets, each borrowing the format of a scientific document: an engineering plan, an archive plan, a gel electrophoresis, a geological column and a deck of IBM punched cards. The figures come from this simulation, not from a performance, and the foot of every sheet says so. Across the set, orange marks human input, and every sheet draws an orange line from the I at the centre of the wordmark down to where the last input falls on that drawing.

Key visual: five companion sheets

The Last Input key visual, sheet 01 INPUT: a plan of where each input landed on the 22 × 22 grid — 01 Input: engineering plan. How many times each cell of the 22 × 22 terrain was played. 343 inputs touched 444 of the 484 cells, and the orange ring marks where the last input landed.

The Last Input key visual, sheet 02 WORLD: an archive plan of the world one second before the blackout — 02 World: archive plan. What still stands one second before the blackout: 7 buildings, 40 viruses and 43 birds, with leader lines marking the infected towers.

The Last Input key visual, sheet 03 TIME: a gel electrophoresis chart with seven lanes — 03 Time: gel electrophoresis. Twenty minutes laid out as seven lanes: plants, birds, ground fauna, buildings, infected, virus and human input. Brightness is the count in each five-second band, and the orange line is the last input.

The Last Input key visual, sheet 04 DEPTH: a geological column where time becomes depth — 04 Depth: geological column. Time becomes depth, with genesis at the base and the last moment at the top. The rock patterns record what stood on the land at each moment, from plants and city to virus and ash, beside a profile of life and a log of input.

The Last Input key visual, sheet 05 RECORD: a deck of IBM 5081 punched cards — 05 Record: IBM 5081 punched cards. The twelve rows are the twelve semitones and each column is one input. Five data cards hold the run's 343 inputs, and the last hole is orange.

The C-LAB Sound Off version: preparing the performance

On the afternoon of 19 October 2026, The Last Input was rehearsed at C-LAB ahead of the performances on 24 October. This version runs about twenty minutes, with its sound redesigned by KIVΛMKII, and the image now has several lenses that can be switched, so the same city can be seen as thermal, as structure or as phosphor. The tablet on the music stand carries the graphic score updated that day, moving forward with the stage clock. After every run, a label printer prints that run as a receipt: how many buildings are still standing, how many are infected and how many viruses remain.

The photographer Chao-Ming Huang (Lidio) was there to record the day. In one run, after the letting go, Che-Yu Wu left the piano bench, sat on a chair by the wall and watched the city carry on by itself.

Motion poster, 30 seconds (with sound)

A 9:16 motion poster grown from the key visual cover: the work runs a twenty-minute performance by itself, one isometric render every 6 seconds joined into a time-lapse, while the analysis panels below grow with the world of that moment. The scored version was finalised on 22 October 2026. The data comes from the system's built-in simulated performer, not from a performance.

Rehearsal, 19 October 202610

The Last Input rehearsal: a golden city across the whole wall, the performer in a white coat at the piano

The Last Input rehearsal: the genesis terminal on the wall

The Last Input rehearsal: the performer in a white coat playing, head down

The Last Input rehearsal: hands on the keys, a graphic score on the tablet

The Last Input rehearsal: the performer, back to the camera, reaching towards the wireframe city

The Last Input rehearsal: the city and terrain under the thermal lens

The Last Input rehearsal: the green terrain under the phosphor lens

The Last Input rehearsal: the city under the structure lens, the performer watching from the side

The Last Input rehearsal: a receipt coming out of the label printer

The Last Input rehearsal: two hands tearing off the receipt

In the order of a performance: boot, playing, changing lenses, letting go, and finally the receipt. Photography: Chao-Ming Huang (Lidio). Click any image to enlarge.

Signal flow: the keys grow the world first, and the sound comes out of the world6

01
Keys and knobs
88-key MIDI controller and 8 knobs
02
Input analysis
note = seed · chord = flock consonance = growth · dissonance = decay
03
A living world
terrain, plants, creatures city vs virus, computed live
04
Sixteen MIDI tracks and positions
ambient / event / narrative layers the spatial coordinates of every object
05
Sound and space
Ableton Live as pure sound source Spat spatial harmony
06
49.4 channels
49 surround speakers and 4 subwoofers sound arrives from where things are

Auditory perspective: what the camera looks at is what you hear (proximity, on-screen energy and visible density feed back to the sound)

Sixteen tracks, three layers

Layer	What sounds	How
Ambient	Buildings, virus, plant families, the bird	Breathes with the state of the world: the taller the tower the higher the note, up to fourteen at once; trees and palms low, shrubs mid, grasses and reeds high, flowers as colour
Event	Topping out, infection, collapse, impact, flocks, seeds, birdsong, ground creatures	One-shot sounds the world throws up: a seed’s velocity is audible; ants high, horses mid, the elephant in the sub-bass
Narrative	The blessing, the hand, shutdown, the typewriter	Cues on the timeline that always land: the four-voice blessing enters seventy milliseconds apart, and shutdown is a single trigger

The sound sources and spatial rack follow no timeline of their own: whatever event the world emits, they sound.

Technical2

First connection to the spatial sound field — April 2026, the first connection to the sound field: five sources, each placed in the 49.4-channel space.

The flow runner during the big-hall rehearsal: timeline, parameters and the playing map. In performance only the world is projected; the tools stay on the desk.

Rehearsal footage

Rehearsal Footage · Premiere Day, 4 July 2026Open in a new tab

Credits

Concept, system and performance: Che-Yu Wu
Sound design (October 2026 version): KIVΛMKII
Presented by: C-LAB (Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab) × Taiwan Sound Lab (TSL)
In collaboration with: IRCAM–Centre Pompidou, France
Supported by: Ministry of Culture, Taiwan
Residency: 2026 IRCAM Residency Programme for Emerging Artists
Technical guidance: Wen Hong-Kai | Taiwan Sound Lab
Spatial audio: Tsang Ching-Hsuan | engineer, Taiwan Sound Lab
Musical feedback: Chen Chia-Hui | composer
One-to-one mentoring: Johannes Regnier | IRCAM
Theatre feedback: Huang Ling-Hsuan | lecturer
Performance photography: 林亞蓁, commissioned by C-LAB
Rehearsal photography (19 October 2026): Chao-Ming Huang (Lidio)
Performance video: C-LAB
System imagery: MonoLab