Woven Land, Woven River

On the wall the cloth is woven in an endless loop; the fell travels from left to right in about a minute, and every pass weaves different data, in five chapters.

One, Land: only the ground weave, Taoyuan's terrain speaking for itself. The weft follows the contour lines, the rivers push the weft aside and expose the bare warp, and the ponds are holes in the cloth. Two, Thirty-five years: one pick per year from 1990 to 2024; five yarns for power, industry, transport, buildings and agriculture, and waste are woven into bands as wide as each sector's share that year, with the carbon sink in deep pine green. Three, Tributaries: the chemical, electronics and metal tributaries of manufacturing flow along the warp. Four, Mending: Taoyuan's carbon-reduction policies are woven as darning grids. Five, Many hands: visitors' answers become shared data woven into the last chapter; whoever signs in becomes a gold thread, and the more people, the denser the gold; with no one there, only the ground weave is woven.

Chapters cross-fade into one another, and a chapter can mutate into mirrored, denser, sparser, hue-shifted or differently woven variants, so no two passes are the same. The weaving also sounds: the loom's warp and weft become a drum kit, joined by a piano, and the larger a share of the data, the higher the pitch.

Hue follows the theme of each chapter: the land takes the colours of the land itself, and the industry scene keeps the same proportions and colours as the observation panel. Brightness and the variants come from the rise and fall of the data. There is no colour key; the colours are how the data is woven.

There is no pre-written score and no recorded track. When each note sounds, which note it is and how loud, are all computed from the loom's state at that moment: which pick it is on, which shafts are raised, which chapter it is weaving, whether someone has just signed in. The piano's timbre is sampled from single notes of a real piano; which note to play, and when, is left to the loom.

Time grows out of the loom as well. Rather than fixing a tempo and fitting the fell into it, the music builds upward from a single pick as its smallest unit of time: 4 picks make a sixty-fourth note, 64 picks a beat, 256 picks a bar. The wall weaves 45 picks a second, so a beat lasts 1.42 seconds, 42 beats a minute, a tempo that is derived rather than set. Sound and image count the same integer, so the two cannot drift apart.

The work is shown at the Taiwan Design Expo 2026 in the Taoyuan Environmental Protection Bureau pavilion, from 24 September to 11 October 2026. The dynamic computing zone is a C-shaped ring of LED with a 2.5-metre opening; visitors walk inside the cloth and watch a world being woven from within. A second screen, the observation panel, shows which chapter is being woven and what data it is eating, and lists the participants who have just signed in.

The day before the Taiwan Design Expo opened, the Taoyuan Environmental Protection Bureau issued a press release on TAOYUAN RE:CODE that introduced this work in its dynamic computing zone: carbon data, Taoyuan's industrial emissions, net-zero policy and visitors' choices growing in real time into ripples, rivers and ponds on a ring of screen. United Daily News and several other Taiwanese outlets ran it the same day.

On opening day the Environmental Protection Bureau published a signed feature in the design magazine MOT TIMES that describes the work's data in four scales: Taiwan's historical emissions as the ground, industry figures as tributaries, Taoyuan's reduction policies as the city's turning points, and visitors' choices stirring the water in real time, with photographs from the site. Shopping Design's editor, walking the expo, described it as a totem wall into which every visitor's choice enters the database and is woven in as it happens.