Between steering and being steered
During Dutch Design Week, TAC opens its doors for the first time since its transformation. The building has changed and for the first time in a long while, the café and restaurant are open again too. Not quite finished, but fully alive: a first glimpse of what TAC is becoming.
Under the title Sway, the whole building turns on a single question: how do we move within systems we did not design ourselves? The theme Automata 2.0 explores the relationship between people, technology and systems — the AI, machines, rules and patterns that shape how we behave. Automata run on fixed rules, yet produce endlessly varying, unpredictable outcomes. We move in between: pushed and pushing back, steering and steered. We sway.
That movement becomes tangible in Sway, the installation by Nikolai Gillissen from which the exhibition takes its name. A hundred electromechanical stalks fill the room, interconnected and responsive to touch. Move among them, touch them, and the motion ripples outward — like wind crossing a field, governed by the simple rules of a cellular automaton. You shape the system, and the system shapes you. Sway makes the logic of automata tangible — not as abstraction, but as sensation.
Around Gillissen, other makers show work in the same field. Marina Orlova turns the logic of AI-therapy on its head and puts the artificial intelligence itself on the couch: in I'm a Robot and I need Therapy, a neurodivergent AI holds a live, unscripted session with a therapist — a sharp, tragicomic inquiry into empathy, power and care in the age of the chatbot. Alongside them, work by Noud Sleumer and Convoy Films (Jurien Cornelissen). On the façade of the atelier building, Ralph Roelse unveils a new mural; in the stairwell, a new light work by Ricky van Broekhoven and Nikolai Gillissen comes to life.
And the whole building is open. The studios of Wijnand Driessen, Noud Sleumer, Metaxas and others welcome visitors; everywhere, work is being made, built and shown. There is more than looking, too: performances, DJs, live music, and food and drink in the reopened café and restaurant.
Come in, look around — and sway with us.
Dutch Design Week 2026 | 17–25 October | TAC, Vonderweg 1, Eindhoven
Free admission. Exhibition daily 11:00–18:00; café and restaurant open later.
