Technology as the Embodiment of Gaya – Reflection on Futurism in HAGAY DREAMING

Feng-yi CHU

Throughout human history, the emergence of new technology has sustained an ambivalent relationship with mysticism, often giving rise to polarized imaginaries. At the birth of photographic technology, it was praised as a craft of immortality capable of “preserving the soul,” while others feared its obscure power to “steal” it. The advent of cinema marked a milestone in humanity’s conquest of “time,” yet it also provoked anxieties that reality might be subsumed by illusion. Today, as AI assumes a central position, it is alternately venerated as a quasi-divine intelligence capable of resolving humanity’s crises and feared as a developing consciousness that could exceed human control, potentially subjugating—or even destroying—civilization.

Whether in the form of technolatry or technophobia, or in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of technology and Neil Postman’s notion of “technopoly,” these positions ultimately converge on a techno-centric ontology characteristic of modernity. In this paradigm, technology is conceived as the dominant structuring force of the world. More than a tool for human use, it is granted ontological status, determining the structure of reality itself and the meaning of existence. This perspective attributes subjectivity to technology, elevating it above humanity at the ontological level and thereby obscuring the fact that it remains an extension of human culture, history, and social relations. 

This is precisely the paradigm that Indigenous Futurism seeks to fundamentally challenge. While most modern futurist narratives ground their imagination of the future in technological progress and innovation, Indigenous Futurism reconfigures this conceptual foundation. It understands the future not as a linear, technology-driven timeline, but as a site for renegotiating relationships among humans, nature, ancestral cosmologies, and traditional knowledge systems. In this framework, technology is no longer granted ontological primacy; rather, it becomes a tool to be mobilized, adapted, and recontextualized. By decentralizing technology, Indigenous Futurism reclaims narrative authority over the future from the structures of colonization and modernity. In doing so, it allows the future to emerge as a confluence of memory, relations with the land, and traditional knowledge—where tradition and futurity co-evolve through lived practice. 
 

Co-created by artists Shu Lea Cheang and Dondon Hounwn, HAGAY DREAMING is a definite practice demonstrating Indigenous Futurism in the realm of contemporary performing arts.  Following its 2020 premiere taking place in the Dowmung Tribe, Hualien, the work was adapted for STWST 48×8 at the Ars Electronica Festival and the Taiwan Biennial at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in the same year.  In 2023, the creative team developed a theatre version that toured to Zurich and Denmark in cultural exchange programs; while in 2025, it was invited by Dance Reflections Festival to be presented at Tate Modern, London.  After five years of creative development and international touring, the full-length version of HAGAY DREAMING will finally take the stage of the Taipei Performing Arts Center in May 2026.

In HAGAY DREAMING, technology is not positioned as the driving force of the future, nor as a symbolic device signifying civilizational progress. Rather, Shu Lea Cheang and Dondon Hounwn describe its use as that of “modern shamanic tools.” Here, technology departs from dominant narratives marked by obsessions with efficiency, control, and capital accumulation, and instead becomes a medium for inheriting, translating, and activating the cosmological principles and temporal sensibilities embedded in Indigenous worldviews. In this reconfiguration, technology is no longer granted ontological superiority over humanity and nature; it is reembedded within tradition to embody Gaya—the universal law and relational ethics practiced by the Truku people since antiquity—and to serve as the medium through which this modern myth is narrated.   
 

On stage, LED beams become the red threads binding the Truku people together; laser light sheds its cold mechanical connotations to form a monumental totem of Gaya. Amid shifting fields of light and shadow, butterflies emerge as guiding spirits sent by Gaya to lead its people forward, while projected images evoke the living presence of forest, mountains, rivers, grass, and stone. Through this transformation, technology appears not as an autonomous object of reverence, but as a visible manifestation of Gaya itself. Its function is not to assert human mastery over the future, but to reveal an omnipresent relational companionship—one that demonstrates how Gaya, in its path, ethics, and futurity, may be embodied within contemporary performance. 

Through its performative medium, HAGAY DREAMING does not seek to offer definitive answers about technology or the future; rather, it reconfigures how the question itself is framed.  By displacing technology from the central position assigned to it within mainstream modernity and reembedding it within the cosmological order of Gaya, the work releases futurity from the presumption of technological domination. The future thus emerges not as the outcome of linear progress, but as a path that must be continually encountered, interpreted, and renegotiated in the act of walking it. Within this theatrical framework, technology is no longer a force elevated above humanity and nature, but a medium that carries memory, relationality, and ethics. In this sense, HAGAY DREAMING embodies Indigenous Futurism while reflexively challenging contemporary technological imaginaries: only when the future is disentangled from technological determinism can we relearn how to move in relation with land, tradition, and the time yet to come.