Biography

Born in Taiwan in 1971, Lin Chi-Wei co-founded Z.S.L.O, Taiwan’s first noise band (1992), and co-organized the Taipei Broken Life Festival (1994,1995), a landmark event at the height of the noise movement in the Island. In 1995-1996, he participated in fieldwork led by ethnomusicologist Lu Chui-Kuan (呂錘寬), focusing on indigenous and Taoist music traditions. In 2000, he moved to France to pursue advanced studies in new media at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains.

His book Beyond Sound Art – Avant-Gardism, Sound Machines, and the Modernity of Hearing, published in 2012, made a lasting impact on the sinophone media art world. That same year, he joined Hanart TZ Gallery (Hong Kong) and was appointed research fellow at the School of Intermedia Art at the China Academy of Art.

A key figure in Taiwan’s experimental electronic music scene during the 1990s, Lin also curated several festivals dedicated to “industrial” music — a genre influenced by Dadaism and Situationism. He was especially struck by the generative role of the audience, whose spontaneous responses often reshaped the performance itself.

At the same time, his ethnographic research at TNUA brought him into contact with aboriginal rituals marked by collective improvisation, where musical notation played no central role. These encounters deeply influenced his thinking on participation and authorship, eventually leading him to develop a body of work based on live audience interaction.

This exploration culminated in the ongoing series Interhuman Dynamic Coordination Models (IDCM) — performative systems designed to evoke forms of collective intelligence that emerge through temporary, participatory gatherings.

Each “Model” functions as a kind of synchronization device, offering minimal instruction to the participants: a few simple cues or sonic frameworks. Within these constraints, participants are free to express themselves, responding to one another in real time. Each voice negotiates its own timing, pitch, timbre, and mode of interaction — whether in harmony, discord, solo expression, or playful provocation.

The IDCM series draws on a wide range of human communicative systems. In the digital realm: Cellular Automata, Talking Knots, and Sequencer Musics; in analogical form: Tape Music, Sound Calligraphy, Quipu Sonore and Chapelet Sonore.

The most widely performed of these works is Tape Music, developed between 2004 and 2006 in Taiwan, Beijing, and Paris. It has since been presented over 200 times worldwide — at venues including the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, and the Shanghai Biennale, as well as in churches, factories, Buddhist temples, elementary schools, and unpredictable open-air settings.

Tape Music mimics the mechanical flow of magnetic tape: long scrolls of annotated scores are passed from hand to hand and vocalized by participants. Without conductor or rehearsal, each performance becomes a unique moment of spontaneous co-creation — a fleeting sonic community that exists in the act of listening and making.

Lin Chi-Wei is currently developing a new writing project that expands his long-standing inquiry into models and systems through the concept of Rule-Based Art. Drawing on games, drills, ceremonies, and ritual practices, his research examines how rule-governed structures generate collective action and emergent form. Lin reinterprets the Confucian framework of Lǐ-Yuè (ritual and music) as a historical model of social coordination, where sound, gesture, and protocol function as interdependent systems rather than expressive media. Through this lens, he challenges conventional distinctions between modern categories , proposing art as a continuous field of shared rules, repetition, and collective regulation.