✍️ assessment2

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█||| Assessment Lodaing...⏳

Preface

The entry of my graduation proposal will be a Buddha machine, a music box for meditation. It was sacred but cheap, industrial yet transcended.

There is a 24/7 sound in my house—ambiguous, genderless, looping "Amitabha" endlessly. This is my **mother's machine**. She once worked on the factory assembly lines; now, she uses this cheap plastic box to "accumulate merit."

Before the graduation proposal, I need to find the clue from my Xpub1 practices, tracing the methodology and topics in the past one year.

Labor + care + body + tech + spiritual = ... ...

In short, I am clear that I want to find the cracks, the glitches, the moments where we can insert our own meanings.

🪷 🪷 🪷 🪷 🪷 🪷

SI#25 SOUND_OF_MAKING

In SI25, sound was the tool to explore invisible discipline.

Broadcast#3: Underwater_Exploration

> Field recording as storytelling
Using water as a metaphor to explore systems. Collaging diverse audio samples to investigate the textures of aquatic environments, finding the materialization, fluity and resistence of the sound.

Key Connection✎: Sound collage, archival practice

Broadcast#5: Bad_Customer_Service

Scripts.exe

> Script-based Narrative
Sound, like call center scripts, is repetitive and systemic. This project constructed a fictional space transforming protocols into narrative scripts.

Key Connection✎: Script-based narrative, fictioning, storytelling

Radio Worm: The Guideline to Shadows' Mindscape

Poster.png

A radio drama about the Chinese art system. Exploring algorithmic intrusion and escape.

Key Connection✎: fiction writing, role play, broadcasting

SI#26 DECLARATION

[Key_Connection]: Interactive Interface

Face_Notation

Prototype_v1.jpg

It is a interactive website that transforms the bodily markers of Chinese physiognomy into a music system.

Users adjust browser windows (CSS Grid), turning the disciplined body into a musical instrument.

  

Key Connection✎: fiction writing, role play, broadcasting

SI#27 See you many times!

The Observer Clock

"Every blink counts.

The more you blink, the faster the clock runs."

Installation in telcom museum

Documentation

The Observer Clock

The Observer Clock transforms our most unconscious body language—blinking—into a direct conversation with time itself. This interactive installation consists of a blinking-detection clock where visitors' blinks literally accelerate the passage of time,revealing how our attention speaks in ways we rarely notice.

I also used the weasy print to documentation the whole research process and the basis machnism.

Key Connection✎: installation, archiving

Cyber Sutra for displaced bodies

🪷SACRED_YET_CHEAP🪷

🪷INDUSTRIAL_YET_TRANSCENDENT🪷

[0] CONTEXT

The Infinite Loop

File:PLACEHOLDER IMAGE OF BUDDHA MACHINE.jpg

The interface of transcendence

Why research the Buddha Machine?

It returns to my home in Shenzhen. There is a 24/7 sound in my house — lo-fi, ambiguous, genderless, looping "Amitabha" endlessly.

This is my mother's machine. She once worked on factory assembly lines as a immigrant labor; now, she uses this cheap plastic box to "deliver sentient beings(ghosts) to after life" and "accumulate merit." The sound have a power to create a sacred place for people who felt displaced.

And I also became one of immigrants far away my hometown, I felt I was one of the "sentient beings" floating in a strange land to find my own meaning. But I found the buddha machine is a displaced object just like everyone else:

The Paradox of Displacement:

• Soundscape: Repetition in the factory is hard labor; in practice, it is healing.
• Body: On the production line, the body is a tool; at home, it is a holy object.
• Identity: Workers exchange labor for capital; listeners exchange listening for afterlife relief.

We have a same destiny in this social structure, I don't know if I could break the loop after I study the mechanism...

Key Question✎: Can this repetitive technology loosen the framework of reality and become a tool for constructing personal meaning.

[1] PROTOTYPES

In Try-out-night, I had three experiments to arrive at this proposal.

Instant Faith Workshop

File:PLACEHOLDER INSTANT FAITH.jpg

Workshop Process

I was scared of the heavy topic, so I tried to find a way to reslove the serious topic. I built a questionaire and participants designed their own "Faith Systems" to test belief mechanisms. We explored personal narratives within exhausted bodies and how to translate dependency into faith using a "seriously unserious" approach. It can also test there is a doubtness in the faith system, you can hardly know about your relief in this faith.

Key Question✎:

Dependency translate into faith?

Legitimate interfaces for re-narration?

Bladder Runner (Field Diary)

File:PLACEHOLDER BLADDER RUNNER.jpg

Field Diary

A visual and textual field diary that employs the bladder as a metaphor to translate visceral bodily experiences from field research on my whole journey in Shenzhen.

• On the assembly line and family, my mother’s body didn't belong to her; She learned to "hold it in."
• As an immigrant, I found myself in the same state—tight, anxious, always holding something back.
• It was a somatic experiment of "endurance." I realized the Buddha Machine is just another kind of bladder. It holds the prayers and pain we cannot release.

Key Connection✎: Creative non-fiction, metaphor as analytical lens.

Mundane Spiritual Interface Mapping

the mapping

Try to find a position in a exhausted time. An interactive survey website collecting and mapping the mundane technologies people use during states of exhaustion.

Key Connection✎: Interactive questionnaire design, data visualization.

[2] Thesis Outline

So far I have these

1. Chapter 1: Formation of the belief system
2. Chapter 2: Mechanism
3. Chapter 3: Transmission

[3] Reflection

A Web-based Installation？

I am still struggling in making a chanting machine or create a non-linear virtual space simulating a state of Spiritual Suspension.

(The user navigates a Phantom City — a digital mirage where clarity requires constant exploration but never truly arrives.)

I have three core concepts I was interested:

1. THE LOOP (Repetition): If input stops, the system decays into noise. Mirrors the "survival mechanism" of factory labor.
2. THE PHANTOM CITY (Ambiguity): Based on the Buddhist concept of Hua Cheng. Moments of clarity (images/sounds) appear but dissolve like mirages.
3. SUSPENSION (Stuckness): Floating in a system that promises transcendence but offers endless continuation.
4. THE MARTIRIALITY OF SOUND: Sound could create a invisible liminal space.

TIMELINE: 4 MONTHS

• Month 1: Deep Reading (Cybernetics) + Visual Concept + Prototype "Infinite Scroll".
• Month 2: Blender Content Gen + Sound Experiments (Factory Noise x Chanting).
• Month 3: Integration + Workshop Testing (Testing "Suspension" atmosphere) + Thesis.
• Month 4: Final UI Polish + Zine Publication.

░░░🪷 Thank you 🪷░░░