Four-Year Capsule
2020
Arduino UNO, Adafruit speaker, pushbutton, acrylic, and stainless steel.

Four-Year Capsule is an interactive sculpture that plays a mixture of English and Cantonese voicemails I’ve received from my family these past few years while I’ve been living away from home. When the button is pressed by the viewer, it triggers the Arduino to play the next voicemail through the speaker. In essence, this sculpture encapsulates these small moments of the past and crystalizes them in the present. As much as it is a conscious preservation of my history and family, it also presents a mode of release. Similar to the event of a random viewer who presses the button to hear a voicemail from the sculpture, these moments in time involuntarily ebb and flow from my memory. Physically, the compact size and transparency of the sculpture mirror the level of intimacy of the content being played. It begs the questions of what is private and what is public, and which parts of myself are retained or shared. Ultimately, Four-Year Capsule is an exploration of identity and vulnerability through the concept of family in relation to memory and the inevitable passage of time.