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Lillyanne Pham - Net Work

A blue fishing net texture with a digitally created net shader in the background. There are emoji buttons of rope knots over top, one has a timestamp above it.

Project Description

Net Work is an interactive digital fishing net made of anonymous voicemails. Participants were invited to leave a message for the language that remembers them… a language they are missing, forgetting, searching for, or hiding from. They could share sound, silence, or story.

Inspired by fishing villages in North Vietnam, where nets are repaired slowly and communally, the project approaches language relearning as a collective act of maintenance rather than mastery. The act of calling and recording becomes the core gesture. Each voicemail becomes a knot. Visitors drift through a woven field of voices, and when a knot is activated, it ripples outward and the net shimmers in response.

As new voicemails are added, the net grows into a living archive of longing, hesitation, return, and resilience, a space where language is held together rather than perfected alone.

Artist Bio

Lillyanne Pham (LP) is an artist who makes work with people. They create murals, workshops, games, and digital projects shaped by friendship, care, and shared memory. Their work moves across archives, gardens, and public art. It pays attention to what people carry, what they are asked to give up, and how ideas of home are made and remade through everyday relationships.

Q&A with Lillyanne Pham

What tools, techniques, or skills did you use for this project?

Net Work was built using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript + Twilio to obtain voicemails. Relied on mentorship meetings with Rachel Stuckey and Kristine Fernandez. The website allows visitors to drift across a net field rather than scrolling through a linear page.

Audio playback triggers a responsive shimmer layer recreating the feeling of online documentation of communal fish net weaving in Vietnam. Look here for an Instagram video and here for stock photos.

The project also relies on relational labor: outreach, invitation, and consent practices. Voicemails are gathered through a phone line and integrated into the site as interactive knots. The technical structure is simple, but the system is sustained by participation.

Is there anything you’d like visitors to take away from this or consider going in?

I hope visitors feel permission. You don’t need fluency to belong to a language. You don’t need certainty to speak. Even silence can be a thread. The net is not about correctness. It is about presence. If someone drifts, listens to one voice, and leaves thinking about their own relationship to language, that is enough.

What inspired you to create this project?

I was thinking about language as something that can fray. As a heritage speaker who was forced to stop speaking Vietnamese in childhood, relearning feels less like studying and more like mending…. slow, repetitive, and communal. After tracing my family’s roots to a fishing village in North Vietnam, I kept returning to the image of nets being repaired by many hands. A net carries the memory of those who mended it before, and of everything it once held. Even when worn or patched, it remains a net and it’s still capable of holding. —

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