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 continually being reconfigured by platforms, algorithms, social media, and generative AI. Meanwhile, the boundaries between reality and fiction, physical presence and virtuality, lived experience and generated content are becoming increasingly difficult to discern. Under conditions of post-truth and information overload, we are more closely connected than ever, yet we do not necessarily understand one another any better. Swept up in an endless stream of images, sounds, viewpoints, and emotions, we find ourselves increasingly beset by doubt, fatigue, and disorientation. This edition’s theme, “How (Not) to Believe in This World Again,” takes this predicament as its point of departure: 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
With this question in mind, Sonic Shaman × Out in the Loop approaches cross-site connection as a channel of perception whose significance extends far beyond technology itself. The remote co-performance linking Taipei and Lucerne, Switzerland, seeks to create a temporarily generated shared field—a point of communal convergence beyond the limits of physical space: a “Teletopia.”＊ Within this space, distance is not merely overcome but reconfigured; remoteness is no longer simply a substitute for absence but another mode of presence; and performance is no longer a one-way transmission but a process of mutual interference, response, and co-creation unfolding in real time. This leads us to ask: must co-presence always depend on sharing the same location? Can collective experience be reinvented under the conditions of a distributed network?
Sonic Shaman and Out in the Loop are particularly well suited to this collaboration because both continually move across such forms as lecture-performance, theater, music, sound, and performance art, dismantling established boundaries between art and entertainment, the experimental and the popular, and the live and the mediated. Both regard the hybridization of forms and the crossing of geographical boundaries as means of sustained reflection on contemporary media, identity, structures of power, and technological conditions. At a time when platformized media increasingly govern what is seen and how it circulates, identity is increasingly produced, performed, and managed within networks, while power permeates the distribution of visibility, the mechanisms of attention, and algorithmic governance.
This form of co-presence is not limited to transnational collaboration among artists; it also encompasses the ways in which audiences enter and participate in the work. Rather than simply viewing a completed piece, audience members decide for themselves when to stay, move, leave, or return at different points throughout the extended event, each tracing a unique path of participation. The festival thus becomes more than a collection of works: it becomes a practice of shared perception, inviting participants from different backgrounds to experience an unrepeatable stretch of time together and to reconsider the relationships between self and other, human beings and technology, and people and liveness.
When Distance Becomes Form
Remote co-performance was hardly unusual during the pandemic years of 2020 to 2022, but at the time it was largely an expedient born of isolation. This project, by contrast, makes remote co-performance the organizing principle of its program, bringing together several groups of Taiwanese and Swiss artists in cross-site performances. In doing so, it transforms “co-presence,” “distance,” and “real-time connection from abstract concepts into an embodied live experience.
Relearning How to Be Present Together
This project does not simply reject technology. Rather, through live encounters with art and music, it seeks to test anew what we mean by “connection,” “trust,” and human “coexistence.” Sound and performance matter precisely because they work directly through the body, time, and resonance rather than merely conveying information. The value of a live event also lies in its demand that people inhabit together the same uncertain and never entirely predictable present. This shared instability may be precisely what remains precious about human subjectivity: it cannot be fully optimized or completely reproduced, nor can it be assimilated in advance by algorithms.
What this project hopes to create is a space in which thought and sensation, critique and embodiment, discussion and resonance can all unfold at once. At a time 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 with the simplicity we once did. Yet it is precisely for this very reason that, through art, music, sound, and shared presence, we need to practice anew how to perceive with others, to doubt together, and to re-enter this world together.
＊ “Teletopia” combines tele- (far, at a distance) with -topia (from topos, place, as in utopia), and has two sources. The first is the Teletopia program launched by Japan’s Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications in the 1980s, which envisioned the future information city through advanced telecommunications infrastructure and carried an optimistic, techno-utopian tone. The second is French theorist Paul Virilio’s Open Sky (1997), which uses the term to critique how real-time communication dissolves physical distance and replaces bodily presence with remote encounters, producing new distortions of perception.