Teletopia: How (Not) to Believe in This World Again
Today, “believing in this world” can no longer be taken for granted. The reality we inhabit is being continuously reorganized by platforms, algorithms, social media, and generative AI; the boundaries between the real and the fictional, presence and the virtual, the experienced and the generated are growing ever harder to tell apart. Under conditions of post-truth and information overload, people are more tightly connected than ever, yet not necessarily more understanding of one another. We are swept up in an endless stream of images, sounds, positions, and emotions, and yet we feel doubt, fatigue, and disorientation more frequently than before. The theme of this project—“How (not) to believe in this world again?”—departs from precisely this condition: when “belief” itself has become complicated, can we still, through art, practice anew how to perceive the world, understand others, and coexist with them?
Telematic Co-Performance as a Channel of Perception
Within this line of inquiry, “Sonic Shaman × Out in the Loop,” a telematic co-performance project, understands cross-site connection as a channel of perception whose significance extends far beyond technology itself. The remote co-performance between Taiwan and Switzerland seeks to create a temporarily generated shared field—a communal crossing point that exceeds the limits of physical space: a “Teletopia” . Within it, distance is not merely overcome but rearranged; the remote is no longer a substitute for absence but another form of presence; and performance is no longer a one-way transmission but a process in which the two ends interfere with, respond to, and co-generate one another in real time. Such a form leads us to ask anew: must shared presence always depend on a single location? Might collective experience be reinvented under the conditions of a dispersed network?
Sonic Shaman and Out in the Loop are well suited to this collaboration precisely because both continually cross multiple forms—spoken-word performance, theater, music, sound, and performance art—and in doing so dismantle the established boundaries between art and entertainment, the experimental and the popular, the live and the mediated. More importantly, both regard this blending of forms and this geographic crossing as an ongoing reflection on contemporary media, identity, structures of power, and technological conditions. At a moment when platformized media dominate the ways we watch and circulate, identity is increasingly generated, performed, and managed within networks, while power seeps into the distribution of visibility, the mechanics of attention, and algorithmic governance. Technology is already deeply implicated in how we perceive the world, understand one another, and imagine the future.
Such “shared presence” is not confined to transnational collaboration among artists; it also concerns how audiences enter into it. Audiences do not merely watch a finished work; across the different temporal nodes of a 24-hour span, they decide for themselves when to stay, move, leave, or return, forming their own singular paths of participation. The festival is therefore not merely a collection of works but a practice of public perception—one that allows participants of different backgrounds, by living through an unrepeatable stretch of time together, to rethink the relationships between self and other, human and technology, human and the live event.
When Distance Becomes Form
This project experimentally seeks to translate a single proposition directly into the way the program is arranged, pairing several groups of Taiwanese and Swiss artists in cross-site co-performance so that “shared presence,” “distance,” and “real-time simultaneity” turn from concepts into a live event that can be experienced through the body.
The following are several of the performance approaches under consideration:
• Taiwanese choreographer Su Wen-Chi and Swiss sound artist Piero Scherer perform together across sites—the body in Taipei, the sound responding in real time from Lucerne—forming a work co-written by distance.
• Taiwanese and Swiss percussionists play in real-time ensemble; a network latency of about 0.3 seconds means the beats of the two sites can never align. The project preserves and amplifies this error, letting the misalignment become a kind of “glitch art” that renders technology’s imperfection as the very texture of the work.
• A Taiwanese and a Swiss DJ undertake a demanding remote, real-time mix, interweaving the grain of Indigenous song with European electronic beats into a transcontinental dance floor caught in the gap between latency and synchronization.
Practicing Shared Presence Anew
What this collaboration hopes to propose, then, is not a simple rejection of technology but a way to retest—through the live event of art and music—what “connection,” “trust,” and human “coexistence” might mean. Sound and performance matter precisely because they act directly on the body, on time, and on resonance, rather than merely transmitting messages; the value of the live likewise lies in its demand that people expose themselves together to one and the same uncertain, not-fully-predictable present moment. This shared instability may be exactly where human subjectivity remains precious: it cannot be fully optimized, completely reproduced, or absorbed in advance by an algorithm.
What this project hopes to create is a field where thought and the senses, critique and the body, discussion and resonance can occur at once. At a moment when AI, post-truth, and platform governance are reshaping the world ever more profoundly, we may no longer be able to believe in this world as simply as we once did; but it is for this very reason that we need, all the more, to use art, music, sound, and shared presence to practice anew how to perceive alongside others, to doubt alongside them, and to re-enter this world together.
Note: The term “Teletopia” is formed from tele- (far / distance) and -topia (topos, place, as in utopia), and has two sources. The first appears in the “Teletopia Plan” proposed by Japan’s Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications in the 1980s, which used advanced telecommunications infrastructure to envision a future of the informatized city, carrying an optimistic, techno-utopian tenor. The second appears in the French theorist Paul Virilio’s Open Sky (1997), where the concept describes how real-time telecommunication dissolves physical distance and replaces bodily presence with “remote encounter,” offering a critique of the placelessness and perceptual mutation that such immediacy produces. This curatorial statement adopts the rendering “Teletopia” while deliberately holding the two positions in suspension—between an optimistic imagination of connection and Virilio’s critique—so as to ask once more whether remote co-presence might still generate another kind of genuine encounter and community.