The three works titled “To Future Listeners” question the presence of the voices preserved by recording technology and the unrecorded voices, by understanding the story and the process of being forgotten behind the recording of the songs recorded on the wax cylinder phonograph.

“To Future Listeners I” is a video featuring the “Love Song: Ar-ra-rang 1,” a Korean traditional song, recorded on a wax cylinder in 1896 by an American anthropologist named Alice FLETCHER. The artist repeats noise reduction using sound editing software, but the song itself is also filtered out as noise, and the sound gradually becomes fragmented. In the “To Future Listeners II,” the artist herself re-recorded the same song onto a wax cylinder and replays it using a phonograph of the early 20th century. “To Future Listeners III” is a work that transforms a song by an Irish male immigrant recorded in the early 20th-century America into a choral arrangement sung by women using digital technology. It focuses on the presence of female immigrants who were not recorded in the history of immigrants told from a male-centric perspective.

Through the degraded audio, re-recorded song, and imagining unrecorded voices, the three works question what has been preserved and what has been forgotten due to recording technology. And they also remind us that the act of leaving records is based on selection and exclusion.