Unread Characters, Series 22025

Unread Characters, a work that draws upon Yi Sang’s Crow’s Eye View. It is a poem written under an oppressive climate when language itself was fractured and estranged. Just as the original poems resisted fixed interpretation and reflected the imposed fragmentation of their time, the artists rewrote Crow’s Eye View by hand and trained it into a machine learning system. The handwritten text was reorganised by the internal logic of the AI, known as a latent space, and rematerialised through an array of lenses and lights into a two-dimensional lenticular structure.

Within the bounded viewing zone, a single character is always visible. But as the viewer moves within a range of one to three meters, shifting up, down, left, or right, the characters morph smoothly from one to the next. This transformation is not random but follows the internal structure of the machine’s internal logic. The work connects a historically censored linguistic expression with the contemporary mechanisms of algorithmic language, staging a dialogue between human resistance and computational patterning.

Here, reading is no longer confined to the eyes. It becomes an embodied act, where the entire body navigates a field of shifting language. The system acts as a collaborator in estrangement, reorganising words in ways that resist capture. The audience, too, is no longer a passive observer but a moving agent within the scattering, invited to explore where meaning is always partial and fluid. As in Yi Sang’s own Crow’s Eye View, the act of seeing is redefined as a precarious and fractured condition, never entirely stable.