Love Letters Without the Recipient

Positioned at the seaside, an AI-driven writing machine is continuously transcribing love letters with evaporative ink. As the letters gradually vanish, they leave no tangible trace, echoing themes of impermanence, transience, and emotional displacement. In this artistic research work, Ziyao Lin explores the evolution of emotional mediation and projection from natural landscapes to artificial intelligence.

Historically, human emotions have been externalised through natural metaphors, mountains, rivers, and celestial bodies have served as poetic vessels for love and longing. In the contemporary era, artificial intelligence has emerged as a new medium for emotional projection. The work bridges nature and machine, reflecting on the interplay between organic impermanence and algorithmic repetition. The AI’s ceaseless inscription mirrors human persistence in articulating emotions, while the inevitable disappearance of words aligns with Eastern philosophies of emptiness (空).