User:Wyn/T6 Assessment

When I entered XPUB two years ago, I came with an interest in practices that face the public, but only with a vague subject. I have never imagined that two years later, I modified two chanting machines and made a web-based story built from its archive.

What led to the final work

Special Issues 25

Protocol for Bad Customer Service (Call Center). What it was: a broadcast working with the language of call centers. My contribution focused on turning a systematic, institutional script — the kind that's normally read mechanically — into something with narrative weight. It was my first time treating found, instrumental language as material to be rewritten.

With: fred, charilie, zuhui, claudio, elini

Protocol for Bad Customer Service script

Special Issues 26

Face_Notation — an interactive website I built with CSS Grid and Web Audio that turned the bodily markers of Chinese physiognomy into a sound system. It was the first project where I treated a cultural reading of the body as data, and translated that data into another medium.

File:Face notation screenshot.mp4

Special Issues 27

The Observer Clock — an installation where blinking accelerates time, as a symbol of invisible labour. It came out of site research and out of my own lived experience, and was documented with weasyprint. It was my first installation, and the first time invisible labour appeared as a theme in my work.

[[[File:The Observer clock Operation.mp4|thumb]]]

What did I learn through those practices

Reading/Writing

• Treating found texts as material to be rewritten — from call-center scripts, to physiognomy text, to the recitation I later wrote for the chanting machine.
• Tracing found objects' circulation historically — following where things come from, who made them, and how they move from hand to hand.
• Connecting personal experience to larger systems and infrastructures.
• An object-facing writing voice, with a non-linear point of entry.

Prototyping

• Letting the object's origin drive the form of the prototype.
• Repurposing existing devices.
• Taking text-based methods into another medium.

What leads me to the project

The thesis takes the nianfoji as its subject. The framework details are already assessed separately, so here I'll stay with one question: how does a mass-produced commodity, made inside a strong cultural context, keep being given meaning and losing meaning as it circulates?

Prototyping of it

What did I find

I started out treating the nianfoji as a religious commodity. Then, through fieldwork and through Pun Ngai's writing on women workers on Shenzhen production lines, I started to hear another layer — its spiritual and material sides both rest on women's labour that goes unnoticed. And in the interviews with people, I saw that each of them was retranslating the machine through their own position. With every replacement, a new meaning appears, and the meaning before it disappears.

What the project was conceptualized as

Shenzhen was built for speed. Since the 1990s, the same factories there have been producing the radios, DVD players, cassette players, and entertainment devices of that era — and among them, the nianfoji: a mass-produced electronic player that loops Buddhist scriptures and chants, usually shaped like a radio. The looped voices come from recordings of monks and collective chanting. The machine is sold as a sacred commodity, its sound purifies a room, blesses, aids meditation. But once it leaves the factory, it doesn't stay in one context. It gets bought, shipped, carried, passed from hand to hand — and as it moves, it drifts away from the stories it came from.

My project takes this circulation as its working ground. A text adventure runs inside a modified nianfoji shell. A reworked recitation replaces the original chant. A web-based archive opens the research material out.

[图片:vintage 念佛机 collection / 工厂历史照片]

Mechanics of the game

A text adventure game with the thesis as its backbone and sound as its main thread. A daughter comes home to fix her mother's broken chanting machine. While repairing it, she becomes familiar again with the environment she grew up in, and through material clues she pieces together a story of the family, the city, and the machine.

[图片:游戏首屏 — 圆屏文字]

Three nested archival voices

The first decision was to embed three nested archival voices inside the game — a Japanese collector, a Taiwanese sound artist, and a Chinese designer. These voices come directly from my own first-hand correspondence and interviews with Kaori Sumiyoshi, Lu Yi, and Mogu. They map onto the three naming mechanisms in the thesis — positional blindness, technical lock-out, and frame absorption. The shell of the machine stays the same, but the voices speaking through it have been replaced. The original monk's recording is silenced; three researched voices take its place.

[图片:三个 archive 入口拼图]

A dual-channel architecture

The game runs on two channels — text as the objective interface side, sound as the subjective side running underneath. The text channel has three layers: L1 for observable clues, L2 for sensory inference, L3 for deeper interiority. The language of L1 came directly from the fieldwork trip back to China — Huaqiangbei, the Shenzhen museum, hospital infrastructure, my mother's spoken memories — all of it recorded in Bladder Runner. The two channels together enact encoding and decoding: the text encodes what's observable, and the sound carries what cannot be encoded directly.

[图片:三层文字 + 声音波形截图]

Living inside the chanting machine shell

This is the decision that holds the project together. The player is not at a computer screen — they are in material contact with the object's history. A physical object, plus invisible sound, plus minimal interaction, makes an intimate and private experience. The internet archive work in Side Notes of Buddha Machine(s) — Dong Suzhen's account of founding the factory, buyer reviews, the aesthetic variations across decades — shows that this shell is itself the site of argument.

So this is where I want to say the sentence that describes both the thesis and the object you are looking at: the shell stays, the content is replaced, the previous voice falls silent.

Technically, the original infrastructure has been removed. Inside the original housing, I've embedded a Raspberry Pi, a 480×480 circular display, and six custom physical buttons.

[[[File:Holding chanting machine.png|thumb]]]

File:Game Screen Recording.mp4

Making it public

The chanting machine

For the graduation show, I'm building a simplified domestic altar scene with secondhand furniture. Visitors will interact with the chanting machine that holds the text adventure inside it. Soil will be placed in the drawer beneath the cabinet — a meeting ground for the solar-powered chanting machine that lives next to it.

Web

The research material — interviews, archive findings, the game itself — also lives on an archive page at project.xpub.nl. The game is embedded inside a circular nianfoji shell PNG cutout as the hero visual, so the same object framing carries over into the web.

[图片:archive 网页截图]

Performance

The second machine is the recitation. The original chanting machine loops a monk's recording as a sacred commodity — sound that purifies a space and blesses. I hijack this mechanism: the original Buddhist loop is replaced with a reworked text I wrote and recorded. It runs on a machine that charges as long as there is light, and it forms a two-voice piece between the machine and myself. The repetitive chant becomes the machine's own product discourse, and in dialogue with the machine, I think out loud about the system behind the nianfoji and what it represents.

Two decisions hold this piece together.

Why a two-voice piece, not a monologue or a chorus. A monologue would let me speak about the machine, keeping me outside it as commentator. A chorus would dissolve the asymmetry between human and machine. The two-voice form keeps that asymmetry visible: the machine carries on its product discourse without pausing, and I speak over and around it — never replacing it, never merging with it. This asymmetry is the thesis position made audible. The machine can take on the repetitive spiritual labour, but it cannot complete the act of naming that gives it meaning. The [M] voice performs the labour. The [Y] voice performs the naming. Two voices, not one.

Why a machine that charges as long as there is light. A battery-powered or wall-plugged machine would let the recitation become a finite piece with a duration. A solar-powered machine ties the recitation to an external condition — daylight in the exhibition space. The work runs as long as the room is lit, and falls silent in darkness. The duration isn't authored — it's environmental. The Side Notes archive shows that the nianfoji has always been an object whose lifespan and circulation depend on conditions outside its maker's intent. Solar power makes that dependency literal. The shell stays the same physical object. The content is replaced — my recitation in place of the chant. And the conditions for it being heard at all are now outside my control. The previous voice falls silent. But so will mine, when the light goes.

I will perform once inside the same altar space during the graduation show.

[图片:太阳能念佛机近景 / 表演设置]

Publication

Alongside the installation, the web archive, and the performance, the project also exists as a box set of three independent booklets: Bladder Runner (field diary), Side Notes of Buddha Machine(s) (internet archive and scavenging), and The Chanting Machine (the thesis). A first prototype will be ready tomorrow.

[图片:三册盒装 prototype]

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I had never imagined that I could write a story into an interactive form, or modify hardware, in the two years before. I learned many different skills here — not only basic coding, but also a way of thinking about social structures and infrastructures. All of those concepts could be linked to my lived experience, helping me observe myself and my background from a different position, and helping me understand others. And I did not expect that variations of the same theme could reach different people, with very different backgrounds.

Thank you.