✍️ assessment2

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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.

Shenzhen manufactures most of the world's cheap electronics while being China's most overworked city. Its shift from "copycat capital" to "design city" masks unchanged logic: repetitive labor, endless optimization.

Young people seek temporary relief in the city's club scene and nightscape, surrounded by techno beats, uncannily similar to my mother and her sutra player. There is a 24/7 sound in my house — lo-fi, ambiguous, genderless, looping "Amitabha" endlessly.

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. The same repetitive technology operates as oppressive labor and spiritual repair.

The electronic sutra player embodies three dislocations: labor (assembly vs. chanting), soundscape (factory noise vs. sacred field), identity (earning capital vs. earning afterlife).

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

Instant Faith Workshop tests mechanisms through participatory design. Building on workshop-based collective validation findings, it tests how participation transforms everyday coping mechanisms into "beliefs"—using simple questionnaires (based on my research on belief systems) and mutual questioning to explore the conditions that make arbitrary practices feel legitimate.

Key Question✎:

Dependency translate into faith?

Legitimate interfaces for re-narration?

Bladder Runner (Field Diary)

File:PLACEHOLDER BLADDER RUNNER.jpg

Field Diary

Bladder Runner uses embodied metaphor to understand displacement. Building on the fiction-as-research method, it translates visceral experiences from Shenzhen fieldwork (pressure, control, release) into analytical insights.

• 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✎: fictioning, metaphor as analytical lens.

Mundane Spiritual Interface Mapping

the mapping

Visualizes collective patterns. Building on SI26's interactive interface design, it collects data on how people today use technological-spiritual hybrids, comparing patterns in groups of people.

Key Connection✎: Interactive design, data visualization.

[2] Thesis Outline

Cyber Sutra for Displaced Bodies: Repetitive Technologies as Meaning-Making Labor

My thesis traces how displaced bodies construct meaning through repetitive technological interaction:

Chapter 1: Formation examines historical conditions—my mother's trajectory from factory worker to spiritual practitioner—that open interpretive space for these practices.

Chapter 2: Operation analyzes how these meaning-making processes work, drawing from workshop and fieldwork findings.

Chapter 3: Transmission explores what patterns pass between generations—not specific beliefs, but methodologies of survival.

The thesis provides analytical framework; the installation creates embodied experience where participants feel these processes themselves.

[3] Reflection

A Web-based Installation？

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. SUSPENSION (Stuckness): Floating in a system that promises transcendence but offers endless continuation.
3. THE MARTIRIALITY OF SOUND: Sound could create a invisible liminal space.

My explorations revealed a pattern: repetitive technologies originally designed to discipline bodies (sound narratives in SI25, facial mapping in SI26, time regulation in SI27) can be repurposed into tools for constructing personal meaning.

The key is "soft interfaces"—technically rigid but interpretively open, allowing this repurposing. But it took me a long time to realize I was studying technical mechanisms abstractly. I needed to ground this in a specific object and context.

Face Notation Workshop showed how collective participation legitimizes seemingly random individual actions—this became key to understanding belief formation. Observer Clock demonstrated how body-tech interaction creates minimal agency even in limited systems. However, physical installation and hardware constraints pushed me toward web-based work, reaching broader audiences.

These insights led me to focus on the electronic sutra player—it perfectly combines all these elements: repetitive technology, body-tech interface, collective validation, mass-produced yet sacred.

This redefined my research question: from "how systems discipline bodies" (too broad) to "how displaced bodies construct meaning through repetitive interaction with technological objects" (focused, testable).

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 🪷░░░