- DATE : 05/11/2025 05/11/2025
- TIME : 10:00–17:00
- VENUE : Filmhouse
Venue: 2.55 Edinburgh Future Institute, University of Edinburgh
1 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh EH3 9DF, UK
2025 Spotlight Taiwan VR Filmfest in Scotland: Showcase of Digital Artist Ya-Lun TAO
2025 蘇格蘭臺灣光點電影節：陶亞倫教授科技藝術專場
Ya-Lun TAO 陶亞倫
Ya-Lun TAO (b.1966) was born in Taipei, Taiwan. Ya-Lun Tao is a pioneer in the Taiwanese new media art scene. He is the recipient of numerous prestigious honours and awards, including the International Digital Festival of Contemporary New Media Art (MADATAC) in Madrid, Spain; the most iconic contemporary art award in Taiwan—the Taipei Arts Award; and the Taipei County Prize. He is also the youngest recipient of the Contemporary Painting Creation Prize, which symbolises the contemporary artistic spirit in the Chinese-speaking art community. Meanwhile, he is the grantee of the Taiwan Fellowship Program by the Asian Cultural Council (Rockefeller Brothers Fund), for which he has been invited to visit the US as a visiting scholar. He has been invited by the Headland Center for the Arts in San Francisco as an artist-in-residence and has been invited by 1a space in Hong Kong and sponsored by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council to become the first artist-in-residence at 1a space. In addition, he has conducted artist residency at the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art, which is famous for digital image and techno-art. Tao was ranked first in the grant program of the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France. He was also an exchange artist in Boston at the invitation of the Boston City Government. Tao was invited by the MADATAC in Madrid, Spain, to present his solo exhibition at the Media Lab Prado in Madrid. He was also invited by the mayor of San Lorenzo del Escorial to present his solo exhibition at the Monasterio de San Lorenzo. In 2009, he was invited by the OK Zentrum in Linz, Austria, to hold a large-scale solo exhibition. Tao has also held solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Taipei; the Digital Art Center, Taipei; the Taipei Fine Arts Museum; the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art, the Hong Kong Arts Center; the Headland Center for the Arts in San Francisco; the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts; IT Park; and Double Square Gallery.
5 November 2025 9:00-14:00 Wandering Ghost Series 《徘徊的幽靈系列》
Venue: E22, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. 74 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh EH3 9DF
Wandering Ghost No.1《徘徊的幽靈 No.1》
3D digital image, VR, Kinetic installation
Dimensions variable, 2020
Wandering Ghost No. 1 is a VR experience installation that moves horizontally. Audiences need to wear VR headsets and stand on a mechanical platform to feel their bodies moving slowly in a horizontal fashion through an enormous space with surveillance towers. When audiences wander between the towers, beams from spotlights pierce and monitor the darkness, like desiring eyes that want to devour individual lives. Through the work, the artist explores the panoptic view of power and the reflexive meaning embodied by the physical/virtual worlds.
The panoptic view of power in the physical world: Foucault applies the “panopticon” to illustrate the operation of social power. Bentham designed the panopticon in 1791, which rendered the prisoners feeling as if they were being monitored all the time and would consequently obey the rules under the surveillance. The interrelation between “watching” and “being watched” is similar to the light shining through the prison cell window, which forms the prisoner’s shadow. Therefore, not only can the prison guards see every prisoner, but the prisoners can also see and monitor one another. The ubiquitous surveillance is embedded with the power of “discipline,” turning society into an enlarged panopticon. The modern technology of discipline by power is internalised as the ability of self-monitoring, allowing power to reach the deepest, darkest corners of an individual’s mind and best exemplifying Foucault’s idea of “microscopic power.”
The panoptic view of power in the virtual world: in the era of “post-new media,” power assumes the form of virtual data, streaming into a massive, self-operating network. Surveillance cameras, sensors and identification systems at every possible corner constitute an Internet of Things. In front of “huge data,” the so-called private information becomes transparent. The virtual world of the internet creates an alternative panopticon, whereas the governance technology enabled by big data evolves into the new power structure. Electronic information technology replaces physical walls and watch towers to deprive humanity of the right to enjoy freedom—it has become the primary strategy to achieve social governance. Like what is depicted in the dystopian novel 1984, “Big Brother” is an omnipresent power.
People have mistaken “freedom” as a concept related to rights and obligations in “the public sphere”; in truth, the value and realization of freedom is in “the private sphere”—it is realized in the sense that people can be free to desire, in the private space of the psyche, unintentional oblivion or deliberate breaches of public discipline. So, the power of watching is not in the hands of the “monitor” but in those of the “monitored.” Freedom as psychological privacy cannot withstand drawn-out surveillance, up-front gaze or sideline observation; on the contrary, freedom only exists in the concealed, inner and invisible space.
Wandering Ghost No.2 《徘徊的幽靈 No.2》
3D digital image, VR, Kinetic installation
Dimensions variable, 2020
VR experience installation Wandering Ghost No.2 requires audiences to put on VR headsets and stand on a mechanical platform that moves vertically to slowly descend into a vast, virtual space.
As audiences enter the gloomy site, a sombre figure implicitly appears, sitting in the sepulchral space with a lifeless yet imposing look. Death does not disappear throughout the vicissitudes of time. Contemporary politics, at any given time, is present, and constantly predicts, manipulates, interferes and directs a wide range of exceptional events, turning everyone into “homo sacer” described by contemporary political thinker, Giorgio Agamben. Contemporary political regimes take turns to invoke the spirits of “savior-like, great figures” to extend and enhance governance technology, creating an ever-lingering spectre lurking in a ubiquitous “power space” manipulated by the combination of contemporary technology and authoritarianism.
Wandering Ghost No.3 《徘徊的幽靈 No.3》
3D digital image, VR, Kinetic installation
Dimensions variable, 2020
Wandering Ghost No.3 is a VR experience installation that requires audiences to put on VR headsets and stand on a mechanical platform that moves vertically, slowly descending into a vast, virtual space.
“Space” is political and ideologically charged, a product informed by a wide spectrum of ideologies that give rise to various, diverse “space politics.” Therefore, when we unfold a panoramic map, it reflects the result of diverse, complex political activities. The artist creates Wandering Ghost No.3 with classical Greek columns and architectural format, matched with arrays of luohan (arhat) stone statues, forming an underground temple ruin that beckons at the museum as a historical site and the derivation of space politics. “Space” has always been shaped by different historical and natural elements—it is a process of politics that is always political and strategic.
Wandering Ghost No.4 《徘徊的幽靈 No.4》
3D digital image, VR, Kinetic installation
Dimensions variable, 2020
Wandering Ghost No.4 is a VR experience installation that moves vertically. It requires audiences to put on VR headsets and stand on a mechanical platform, slowly ascending and moving horizontally through the tower before returning to where they start.
In the Book of Genesis in the Christian Old Testament, the man-made Tower of Babel represented humankind’s desire to reach heaven. The ambitious action was stopped by God, who divided humankind by making them speak different tongues. Without communication, the plan to build the tower soon failed and humankind became dispersed in the world, unable to build the road to heaven ever again. In modern linguistic context, the Tower of Babel also refers to “utopian fantasies.” “Utopia,” etymologically speaking, refers to “no-place” and “a good place,” paradoxically implying that the good place is nowhere to be found.
The artist posits the utopian concept between the real and the virtual, hinting that the “interior” of this massive museum is built on a found ruin. Therefore, in the virtual reality, he constructs the ancient Tower of Babel with stone, giving it a historical appearance, whereas the interior is rendered high but empty, with scaffolding to convey the ruinous imagery. The collapsing Tower of Babel ends with the chaotic loss of a unified language—a metaphor for contemporary humanities and culture. It reminds people of major 21st-century events, such as the September 11 attacks and all other actions done in the name of “justice,” which serve as the modern examples of the fallen Tower of Babel. Social development and progress are based on human concepts. History itself has no end and constantly repeats like a feedback loop. When the contemporary Tower of Babel collapses, it becomes a reminder for humankind to think about what “utopia once again” really means.
Wandering Ghost No.5 《徘徊的幽靈 No.5》
3D digital image, VR, Kinetic installation
Dimensions variable, 2020
Wandering Ghost No.5 is a VR experience installation that moves vertically. It requires audiences to put on VR headsets and stand on a mechanical platform that slowly ascends into the virtual gigantic red dome.
The work reveals a virtual image of a massive radar, beckoning at information-gathering surveillance radar system operated by the national capital—this is the artist’s interpretation of how the “virtual reality” entirely replicates political and social systems in the physical world. It becomes a new form of technological authoritarian system that creates resistance between the power centre and the peripheral as well as tension between dictators and those fighting for freedom in the virtual network. As modern man longs to hold onto freedom, he must become a “ghost” to frequently switch from one virtual space-time to another to escape the virtual apparatus and its governance. However, we can never be sure if contemporary technology is leading us towards a utopia of technology or a perfect totalitarianism. The efficiency and the power of contemporary technology allow contemporary politics to take advantage of the effectiveness and concealability offered by technology to enhance and expand its control – the total control that is far more powerful and fierce than traditional authoritarianism – over the state and its people.
Wandering Ghost No.6 《徘徊的幽靈 No.6》
3D digital image, VR, Kinetic installation
Dimensions variable, 2020
Wandering Ghost No.7 《徘徊的幽靈 No.7》
3D digital image, VR, Kinetic installation
Dimensions variable, 2020
Wandering Ghost No.6 and Wandering Ghost No.7 are VR experience installations that move horizontally. Audiences are required to put on VR headsets and stand on mechanical platforms that slowly move through vast virtual spaces.
Paul Virilio describes the hyper-realistic, encoded world as “death at birth” and “near-death experience,” which are reminiscent of the physical experience one might undergo on the verge of life’s end in clinical medicine: the body drifts like a “ghost” and whatever seen and heard becomes disassociated from the physical, real world.
As of now, the deep fear of being infected with viruses has kept people away from making physical contact, further pushing cultural activities into virtualization and completing the colonization of the everyday life (physical reality) by the internet space (virtual reality). Our consciousness, body and perception have all become data, like hidden, fluid ghosts, dispersed in a wide range of desiring machines. The virtual body is not an explicit “presence,” nor an empty “absence.” It is simultaneously capable of destruction and compensation. In the form of compensation, it denies and supplements the “presence” of the physical reality, “suspending” the physical reality while augmenting it. Like a “ghost,” it is neither external nor internal, neither virtual nor real. Instead, it is an intimate combination of reality and virtuality that coexist in the consistently expanding multiple space-time.
Wandering Ghost No.8 《徘徊的幽靈 No.8》
3D digital image, VR, Kinetic installation
Dimensions variable, 2020
Wandering Ghost No.8 is a VR experience installation that moves horizontally. It requires audiences to put on VR headsets and stand on a mechanical platform to feel their bodies slowly move through a vast virtual underground hideout and wander in the dome-shaped concrete fortress that embodies a cold, stern sense of mystery with an extending tunnel and a gloomy, silent atmosphere. Erected on both sides of the tunnel are spherical objects covered with various electric wires and devices. Their identical appearance suggests replication and derivative production, recalling massively produced destructive weapons. Are they steel cannons? Or, is it an imagery evoking the threat of biological technology and weaponry?
Tao Ya-Lun employs these atomic bombs in the underground hideout as a symbol to denote the varying metaphors of atomic bombs that echo the spreading virus enabled by globalization, creating a changing global scene. The order of the modern world is the result of World War II. Looking back upon the world wars seventy years ago, militarism also spread throughout the world like today’s pandemic. Humanity, after a period of peace, is now faced with a new twist of events. The military competition between the US and Russia as well as the war resulting from the desire for power have returned like the ghost of history—the destabilized peace will surely push human civilization towards a turbulent future.
Wandering Ghost No.9 《徘徊的幽靈 No.9》
3D digital image, VR, Kinetic installation
Dimensions variable, 2020
Wandering Ghost No.9 is a VR experience installation that moves in a horizontal fashion. After putting on VR headsets, audiences can stand on a mechanical platform and feel their bodies slowly moving horizontally in a vast virtual utopia.
“Monument to the Third International” was a project devised by Vladimir Tatlin for the propagandist monument plan led by Lenin in 1919. To commemorate the October Revolution, the monument’s artistic concept was laden with political appeal and social ideal. Architecture-wise, it fully embodied the thinking of constructivism and conformed to the Soviet Union’s ideal of national efficiency.
Built with industrial material, such as steel, iron and glass, the conical spiral monument reveals a massive structure that displays immense momentum, which, if completed, would not only exceed the height of the Eiffel Tower but also break away from classical architecture. Within the steel structure of the tower is a geometrical building comprising four rotating tiers, each turning at a speed rate determined by its function and execution efficiency. The ground-floor cube is to be used for the legislative institution; its rotation rate follows the legislative session cycle and takes one year to complete a full spin. The pyramid space above the cube, which is for the administrative institution, completes an individual spin every month. The subsequent cylinder is the information centre of the propaganda and communication institution, which rotates daily. The top tower, installed with projection equipment, completes its spin hourly. The spire of the tower functions as a radio tower for broadcasting and is equipped with a powerful projection system that can project important national decisions and messages onto the cloud every day. In terms of the state apparatus, the tower is the hardware, and people’s power is its software—a celebrated open system that honours people’s decisions to be announced by the government. It is not only a symbol of the communist power but also that of people’s power.
However, Tatlin only finished the model of the monument. Like the modern Tower of Babel, it was never built; yet a later generation has imagined and interpreted it throughout history. It has never existed in reality, but it is never absent; instead, it lingers in people’s minds and never disappears.
Wandering Ghost No.10 《徘徊的幽靈 No.10》
3D digital image, VR, Kinetic installation
Dimensions variable, 2020
Wandering Ghost No.10 is a VR experience installation that moves in a horizontal fashion. With their VR headsets on, audiences stand on a mechanical platform and feel their bodies slowly moving horizontally into a vast virtual amusement park.
An amusement park is a product of the industrial age. The idea of an amusement park, which denotes a development from playgrounds to theme parks, can be traced back to three cultural phenomena in European history: periodic fair, pleasure garden and world fair. The number of amusement parks peaked in the early stage of the Industrial Revolution during the 18th and 19th century, and the phenomenon culminated in London where the development of capitalism and civil society first flourished. However, the world fair, with its ambition to seek novelty, demonstrated the zeal for new technologies, the fervour for accumulating capital and a fantasy to impress other countries, which lead to the emergence of contemporary theme parks. It foreshadows the lifestyle of a capitalist world from the end of the 19th century to early 20thcentury while beckoning at the arrival of a consumption-based culture in the context of globalization.
In 2005, the world’s fifth Disneyland was inaugurated in Hong Kong, “the Pearl of the Orient” where Eastern and Western cultures intersect. At the same time, it also indicates the expansion of the global consumer culture and its related industries. “Globalization” is in fact embedded with the connotation of hegemonic colonization. French media cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard has pointed out that Disneyland is the perfect simulacrum, a massive reality show, in which reality is replaced by thematically designed spectacles and people can live in a virtual fourth dimension—a utopia that transcends time and space while encompassing all histories, future and culture.
Amusement parks adopt the capitalistic logic to manipulate consumers’ desires and the mode of consumption. The highly developed capitalist society further evolves into the high degree of freedom in terms of Hong Kong being the international financial centre in Asia as well as a city that attracts the world’s capital flow. However, facing the fact that global capitalistic simulacra have now formed a heterogeneous hegemony of globalization, one cannot help wondering: is the amusement ride high in the sky in Wandering Ghost No.10 with no people on it hinting at a joyful tomorrow? Or is it simply a fragmented fantasy that mourns the loss of thought built on the spiritual ruins of cities?
Theatre in the Brain《腦內劇場》
3D digital image, VR, Kinetic installation
Dimensions variable, 2025
Use illusion to express illusion and expose illusion
Is the strongest political significance of art
用 幻相 來表現 幻相，來揭露 幻相
是 藝術 最強的政治意義
Nietzsche once said: Art is a scam. Art itself is a fictional illusion, but it uses illusions to express illusions and to expose illusions. Art itself is fictitious, but it also exposes all fictitious illusions. The value of art does not lie in the fact that it exposes illusions, but in the fact that art erases truth, uncovers illusions, and opens up this false world of reality.
What we call “the world” refers to the world that can be perceived by human senses and touch, a subjective “brain image” world. Color does not exist. Light of different wavelengths is reflected in our brains. Our visual nerves classify and reorganize the light, so we have the colorful world in our brains. Humankind’s vision has moved from the absolute space-time view of Newton’s era to the relative space-time view. People have many different views and discussions on the same space-time process. For all people who live in an instrumental rational system, in multi-dimensional time and space, the world we can observe and understand is only the projection of three-dimensional time and space on our “brain images”. In different three-dimensional time and space, the amount of projection that our eyes can see is also different. We all give the most accurate measurement based on the phenomena we see from our perspective in this three-dimensional space, so our measurement values are different every time. Everything is correct, but what we measure is only the projection of the “image in the brain”, which is just an illusion. We have only seen a drop in the ocean of this vast universe of time and space.
The projection of the future world is a digital simulation of our “brain images”. A person who is born with his brain in a fish tank and lives by a calculator will regard all sensory information he receives as false. Of? As Hawking said, creatures living in a virtual world cannot observe their universe from the outside, so they have no reason to suspect that the world they live in is not “reality.”
In addition to the information received by the brain from external digital simulation technology, anything we see, sound, or even the feeling of touching an object is reflected in the brain by various nerves inside our body. circuit of electronic signals. In other words, our understanding of the world comes from the translation and reorganization of neural signals in the brain. However, can this seemingly superior nervous system completely and accurately receive, translate, and understand all the messages in the universe? Or is it just the opposite, is it our “brain images” that are being translated into all the information in the universe?
“Theater in the Brain” audience participation steps:
- “In front of the curtain” is the “Sacrifice Altar.” The audience enters the physical “Sacrifice Altar” one by one, and the place is quiet and clean. The audience wears “encephalograph” and “VR glasses”. The audience wears a “brain wave meter” to detect changes in the audience’s brain waves. The biological image at the center of the audience’s point of view in the “VR glasses” will gradually change with the brain waves of the audience.
- “Behind the scenes” children’s body movements control the giant creatures in the VR virtual image of the viewer on the “Sacrifice Altar”. The huge creature is also projected on the big screen “in front of the screen” in real time.
- At the “Sacrifice Altar” in front of the “curtain”, the audience wears a “brain wave meter” to detect changes in the audience’s brain waves. The biological image in the center of the audience’s point of view in the “VR glasses” will become larger and larger along with the brain waves of the audience.
- The biological image in the “VR glasses” finally eats the audience on the “sacrifice altar” one by one. That’s the end of a show.