Exhibitons / Dear Taiwan, Outdoor Exhibition
Xhin Toh X g0v
In the office of g0v, Taiwan’s civic tech community, there is a line I still remember vividly: “We all have bugs, because we are organic.”
With advances in image sensors and the assistance of AI, digital cameras are becoming ever more powerful in recognizing faces and objects. Yet even though we can now open a lens at any moment to view the world, there are still times, sometimes only a fraction of a second, when AI misjudges. The recognition box that is supposed to outline a living being may instead land on an empty corner. In technical terms, this is called a “bug.”
Isn’t the functioning of society much the same? The human eye, with its 576 million or so pixels, is constantly flooded with information. Wherever people exist, there will always be bugs. Yet there is a group of people who gather in a Nobody, decentralized way. They use their expertise to integrate and clarify society’s complex information, debugging from the bottom up. In doing so, they make information sources clearer, more transparent, and more objective. They also release open-source tools that allow ordinary people to participate, monitor, and make use of them. As a result, society moves forward not only through top-down governance but also through the autonomous power of civic participation.
This photography project takes inspiration from g0v’s initiatives, adopting the metaphor of the bug and using the camera to travel from south to north across Taiwan, tracing the relationship between g0v and democracy.
Photography, however, can never fully narrate or reproduce reality. In essence, photography itself is also a medium full of bugs. From the moment an image is created to the moment it is seen, the process of interpreting its meaning is itself a kind of ongoing debugging. Perhaps the relationship between people and photography, like the spirit of g0v, is both buggy and organic.
Xhin Toh
Xhin Toh, born in 1991 in Johor, Malaysia, is currently based in Taipei. He graduated from the Department of Radio, Television and Film at Shih Hsin University. He formerly worked as a photojournalist at CommonWealth Magazine. During his time in Taiwan, he began exploring photography—pursuing beauty while also using the medium as a way to heal and understand his inner self.
g0v (gov-zero)
g0v (pronounced “gov zero”) is a grassroots civic community in Taiwan dedicated to deepening citizens’ contributions to society and strengthening the connections among them.
Grounded in transparency, publicly accessible outcomes, and collaboration, g0v embraces a decentralized, co-creative model that brings people together to drive change in Taiwanese society. The community firmly believes that “nobody is anybody.”
Through a variety of activities, g0v enables participants to find like-minded partners, put their ideas into practice from the ground up, and release the outcomes under open licenses, allowing more people to build upon the work and continue moving forward.
