Before Language Settles

Before Language Settles explores language as a fluid and unstable process shaped by sound, translation, and embodied interaction. In the context of increasing multilingualism and cross-cultural migration, language no longer functions as a fixed system of meaning, but as something continuously negotiated through mishearing, mistranslation, and phonetic difference. These moments of instability reveal language not only as a medium for communication, but as a sensory and temporal experience.

This research-creation project treats sound as a compositional force that reorganizes multilingual text in real time. Through interactive digital systems and responsive typographic environments, spoken voice, ambient sound, and bodily presence influence the movement, formation, and legibility of text. Words emerge, disperse, overlap, and transform, shifting between clarity and illegibility.

The exhibition presents interactive projections and tactile printed works, inviting visitors to engage through speaking, reading, listening, and physical proximity. As sound intervenes in textual structure, language becomes dynamic and contingent, no longer stable or singular but continuously reconfigured through interaction. In this space, language is experienced not simply as something to be understood, but as something to be inhabited, performed, and felt.

^{© Yuxuan Lin, 2026}