In our life, we may encounter some occasions when we find it Human beings initiated the most primitive cultural inheritance through oral traditions. For thousands of years, during multiple processes of cultural transmissions, languages have stretched over complex mental exchanges and transformations between their inputs and outputs, going through various adaptations and modifications and evolving into their diversity. Our designing project proposes that in the process of transmitting memories through the medium of language the most interesting features are the variability and the randomness of languages. Concomitant with different backgrounds and thoughts of listeners, original memories will gradually metamorphose into diverse experiences. Our work “Metamorphic Message” is primarily devised from this perspective.

The basic device of Metamorphic Message is composed of three gadgets equipped with functions of recording and playing. Copies of the device are installed in three locations. After playing previous recordings, the user of the device can record a new message and allow the message to be transmitted and randomly circulated among the three locations. With the successive and repetitive circulation of messages, original recordings will be covered layer by layer and eventually become unrecognizable, just in the same way as memories pass into oblivion. Next time the user listens to and records messages, traces of previous recordings will evoke vestiges of past memories, though what are addressed turn out to be metamorphic messages.

Metamorphic Message presents a form of collective memory combining a diversity of recollections. The device, in addition, serves as a physical representation of human imagination. As a form of public art, Metamorphic Message invites large audiences to participate in the process of creation, to interminably reverse and metamorphose messages, to compose a series of ingenious stories like those passed down from ancient oral traditions.

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