Wandering Daughter’s Warfarring
Creators｜Lee Tzu Tung & Meichun Lee, Cheng Peng, Fu-Shiang Ching, Lulu Keng, Rosa Kuo (Cyborg Resilience Co-lab)
Time｜Oct. 17 - 25 Location｜B3 (Basement Level 3), New Taipei City Art Museum
Special Exhibition for “AI for ALL: Opening Act, Taiwan Festival 2026”
Description
Whether drone swarms, AI targeting systems, cognitive warfare or cyberattacks – contemporary conflict has outgrown physical borders, and the speed at which human ethical cognition can process it, bleeding into an unseen algorithmic realm. This is the new frontline of war, choked by the miasma woven from AI computational power distributed by capital moguls and disinformation intertwined. Here, the binary between victors and victims no longer stands, the distinction has collapsed into tangled complicity.
Violence floods in 24/7 as data and code, slow as a relentless form of torture. It manipulates our everyday sense of safety, fractures the digital environments we live in, while demonstrating the fiction of perpetrator’s power. Our cognitive space thus has been reduced, cornered to a condition of waiting: waiting for the missiles and bullets to fall.
In Taiwanese folk religion, the “wandering daughters (孤娘)” refers to unmarried, childless women who are excluded from patrilineal ancestral shrines. Their lives are erased by patriarchal society. Building shrines for them is a way of making the absolute certain yet unsharable, unspeakable pain into an objection of sentience that can be imagined and worshipped.
Guided by this metaphor, Wandering Daughter’s Dronecraft is making its own path through the Bardo – the zone blurring life and death, the authentic or false. By making ritual, art, civil-defense education, and digital activism, the project makes the pain within the grey zone objectifiable – to project it out into the world so that it can be perceived and altered.
We organize “Non-Visual Civil Defense Workshops” to push back against the violent contraction of our cognitive space; concurrently, our “Bardo Narrative Workshops” deploy post-human pseudo-narratives to disrupt the accepted realities of conflict; our “Anti-Surveillance Fashion Workshops” investigate and design ways for people to evade drone identification.
Every artistic experiment, ethnographic research, technological intervention serve as a restorative act that reverses the unmaking of the world wrought by the simmering slow violence, reweaving the grey ruins it leaves behind.
At AI for All, our team presents fragments from this ongoing process of making. Just as water lanterns in Taiwanese folk rituals call out spirits lost in violent communal conflicts, the Wandering Daughter now accompanies us in confronting the slow violence that infiltrates our digital habitat. Together, by revealing the invisible spectacles of power operating in the gray zone, we create spaces of equilibrium from which to reimagine and resist them.
On-Site Devices
01｜Tents
Concealment / Camouflage / Anti-Surveillence
To avoid being detected by drones, tents serve not only as shelters but also as mobile forms of concealment. They obscure human silhouettes and prevent thermal signatures from being detected by infrared sensor.
02｜Meshtastic & Radio
Decentralized Networks / Real-time Communication
During wartime, cellular towers and internet infrastructure may be cut off, rendering centralized communication systems obsolete. Meshtastic functions as a decentralized communication node, enabling critical information transmission across networks. Radio combined with antennas, can transmit locations and warnings across vast distances.
03｜Computers
Intelligence / Collaboration / Counter-attack
Computers can be used to gather intelligence, analyze data, coordinate actions, and learn how to build countermeasures such as drones. They can also become tools for launching digital attacks and information warfare.