This paper investigates the materiality of artificial intelligence by examining the role of water in two Taiwanese media artworks: Su Yu Hsin’s Particular Waters (2023) and Ku Kuang Yi’s God of Water (2024). Both projects move beyond conventional AI discourses, using artistic mediation to uncover how elemental matter—specifically water—shapes and is shaped by AI technologies. Engaging with water as both ecological actor and cultural symbol, these works reorient our understanding of AI’s infrastructure and its entanglement with the natural world.

Taiwan, as a global center for semiconductor manufacturing, foregrounds this inquiry. Su Yu Hsin’s installation interrogates the water networks sustaining the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), drawing on feminist perspectives and micro-histories to reveal overlooked labor and material flows. Her work reconstructs the 2021 drought through the embodied experiences of a female water truck driver, foregrounding gendered dimensions of water logistics and the ecological disruptions underlying AI’s material substrate. The installation combines video, material processes of integrated circuit fabrication, and speculative visualization to articulate new relationships between human, water, and technology.

In contrast, Ku Kuang Yi’s God of Water fuses scientific and spiritual narratives, employing digital technologies and ritual to reimagine human-water relations. The work uses water as an anchor for algorithmic processes, contemplating the dominance of “supercomputers” and AI, and questioning how intelligence emerges in relation to natural forces.

Through the lens of socio-technical imaginaries, I argue that these artworks enact a kintsugi epistemology—repairing the rift between affect and empiricism, matter and meaning—by illuminating the seams where technology, art, and environment meet. Ultimately, this paper proposes that such artistic practices offer vital new models for knowledge-making at the intersection of art, science, and society, particularly in an era shaped by technological transformation and ecological crisis.