Unreadable Letter
Thesis Faculty:
Mani Nilchiani, Ethan Silverman, Sam LavigneUnreadable Letter is a single-participant interactive sound installation that listens to what gets swallowed between languages. The participant writes a letter that will not be sent. As they type, some characters are quietly swallowed, and what does not arrive in words returns as sound. The work treats writing as a form of care, and listening as a form of presence.
: Giving a Voice to the Words We Chose to Swallow
Unreadable Letter is a participatory, embodied sound media installation about being heard and becoming a listener to oneself.
Living in a city like New York, departure is a quiet condition of daily life. We depart from a mother tongue, from a place, and from versions of ourselves we no longer fully recognize. With this comes the weight of what remains unsaid: what cannot be translated between languages, or delivered between people. This work begins in personal experience but reaches toward a shared condition—a poetic instrument for the words we chose to swallow.
About
In Korean, there is an expression: 말을 삼키다 (mal-eul samkida), “to swallow one’s words.” It can sound like silence or failure. I want to hold it differently. Sometimes swallowing words is a form of care. Out of love, we do not always deliver every detail. We edit ourselves to protect the people we are speaking to. What remains unsaid does not disappear. It accumulates.
This work turns those undelivered words into sound. A participant writes a private letter, and as they type, the letter is translated into music that fills the room. What cannot fully arrive in words returns as sound — a letter heard rather than read, a new form of delivery for what was never sent.
The work sits between connection and disconnection, between speaking to another and listening to oneself. It invites the participant to become the first listener of their own words, and to let what could not be said exist anyway, even as sound.
How it worked
The installation unfolded in two parts: reading and writing.
01 Reading Visitors traced archived letters on a screen with their fingertips. Fragments of text and the artist’s voice surfaced, but no specific meaning was delivered. Truth stayed with the sender, leaving the receiver with a gap in interpretation.
02 Writing Visitors entered a private booth, wrote a letter, and read it aloud. Voice and text were linked into an interactive web letter, shareable through a link. A receiver could uncover sounds and characters with the cursor, but never the full original. The sender alone became the letter’s complete receiver.
In the breathless pace of modern life, we live with partial understanding
and quiet emotional distance, accepting them as ordinary.
Anyone, at times, becomes a silent stranger in their own life.
This installation stands as a letter to every stranger of our time.
