Let'em Talk, Let'em Breathe - 2023

Let’em Talk / Let’em Breathe is an interactive video installation examining bilingualism, visibility, and mediated communication. The work presents interviews with six people living in an English-speaking country whose first languages are not English. Participants speak about everyday life — habits, food, social interactions, and relationships to their environment — before moving to more personal material, including a private note or a favorite poem in their mother tongue.Viewers initially encounter the speakers in English through a layer of fog-like digital & physical distortion that obscures their image, staging the friction of speaking in a second language. Interaction is triggered through mini computer (Arduino) using magnetic sensors that checks the status of the window. When the window opens, the video shifts to the original language. Even without semantic comprehension, shifts in tone, facial expression, rhythm, and affect become legible, revealing how meaning exceeds translation. (Presented in Plai Lab at UT College of Fine Arts - Dec. 2024)