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 script

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

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.

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.

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

The project moved through several material stages: from field notes written on the road, to physical mock-ups of the modified machine.

Bladder Runner is a diary format that came out of the fieldwork trip back to China, where the text adventure story began.

The chanting machine prototype was built in Decker, coming out of testing how the game could live inside the original housing.

A text adventure in Decker

Side Notes of Buddha Machine(s)

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.

Why the nianfoji

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.

The chanting machine disassembled

Mechanics of the game

A text adventure game with the thesis as its backbone and sound as its main thread.

The story begins with a daughter coming 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.

Three nested archival voices

Inside the game, three nested archival voices come from 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.

Sound design

The game runs two layers of sound at the same time. One follows what the player is doing in the moment; the other follows the chanting machine itself as it breaks and is repaired.

Sound by interaction layer. When the player touches an object, a whisper enters — small, close, as if speaking to the object itself. When they move through a scene, the sound widens into something warmer, with the texture of memory. When they enter a perspective shift — into the mother's factory, into Kaori's collection, into Lu Yi's modification work, into Mogu's neighbour story — the sound drops underwater. It becomes exploratory, slightly mysterious, like searching through a body of water.

Sound by narrative arc. Underneath these interaction sounds, the machine itself has its own voice that moves with the story. Outside the door, before the daughter enters the house, a full Amitabha chant is playing — the machine is working. The moment she steps inside, the sound begins to fail. The broken chanting runs underneath every room for most of the game. In the factory layer, the broken chant is replaced by 1980s Cantonese pop on the factory radio, mixed with the workshop noise of the production line. Once the player completes both routes and repairs the machine, the full chant returns at the end.

Text layer

The game text runs in three layers. L1 sits on the surface — observable clues, written in a flat, restrained voice. L2 expands once the player selects an object: sensory inference, what the object feels like or implies. L3 is reached through [read more] — archival text in the original language of each archive voice (Kaori in English, Lu Yi in Traditional Chinese, Mogu in Simplified Chinese). Each deeper layer asks the player to commit one more action; nothing is revealed automatically.

The two channels — text and sound — together enact encoding and decoding. The text encodes what's observable; the sound carries what cannot be encoded directly. The language of the text layer came directly from the fieldwork trip back to China, recorded in Bladder Runner.

Spatial writing

The house is written as a sequence of rooms, each one functioning as both a physical space and a narrative unit. The structure below shows how the player moves through the house — from the door, into the living room as the hub, branching into the surrounding rooms, and eventually returning to the living room for the ending.

[PROLOGUE: outside the door]
      │ 
      ▼
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ STAGE 1: Living Room (the present: a body at standstill, inflamed)     │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
      │
      ├───► [worship cabinet] ──► [Guanyin] ──► [incense burner] ──► [fruit offering]
      │         │                                                              │
      │         │                               ◣──────────────────────────────┘
      │         └──► [nianfoji (Silent Phase 1 & 2)]
      │
      ├───► [tea table] ──► [porcelain cup] / [prayer beads]
      │         │
      │         └──► [medicine bottles]
      │
      └───► [old stereo] ──► [calendar]
                │
                ▼
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ STAGE 2: Exploration & puzzle spaces (research-feel → hardware puzzle) │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
      │
      ├───► 【Toward: Mother's Room】
      │         │
      │         ├──► [bed] ──► [bedside table] ──► [mini scripture book]
      │         │
      │         └──► [drawer]
      │                   │
      │                   ├──► [nianfoji packaging box] ──► [song index] (Kaori entry point)
      │                   │
      │                   └──► [old work badge] ──► 【Enter: 1990s Shenzhen factory】
      │                                                         │
      │                                                         └──► [conveyor belt casing]
      │                                                                  │
      │                                                                  └──► [window sill] ──► [radio]
      │
      ├───► 【Toward: My Room】
      │         │
      │         ├──► [luggage]
      │         │
      │         ├──► [medical report]
      │         │         │
      │         │         ├──► [results / data list]
      │         │         │
      │         │         └──► [processed label]
      │         │
      │         ├──► [laptop]
      │         │         │
      │         │         ├──► [misprinted text]
      │         │         │         │
      │         │         │         └──► [loose internal structure]
      │         │         │
      │         │         └──► [the boss and the workers]
      │         │                   │
      │         │                   └──► [worldly benefit]
      │         │
      │         └──► [iPad] ──► [circuit board, main view]
      │                   │
      │                   ├──► [exposed pins]
      │                   │         │
      │                   │         └──► [photoresistor]
      │                   │
      │                   └──► [single chip]
      │                             │
      │                             └──► [no way in / sealed seam]
      │
      └───► 【Toward: Kitchen & Balcony】
                │
                ├──► [kitchen] ──► [cold stove] / [assorted thermos flasks]
                │
                ├──► [bathroom]
                │
                └──► [balcony] ──► [tropical plants] / [drying rack]
                          │
                          └──► [neighbour's lotus-shaped player] 
                              (Mogu entry point: hardware disassembly & contest over naming)
                                    │
                                    └──► [modified MP3 module] ──► [mirrored installation]
                │
                ▼ (Any 2 of the factory, laptop, iPad and balcony paths unlocked)
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ STAGE 3: Back to the Living Room (Phase 3: returning, re-engagement)   │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
      │
      └───► [the broken nianfoji]
                │
                ▼
            【THE FINALE】 (Original Sanskrit chant returns)

The chanting machine's sound is always present in the living room, anchoring the player back to the central object. The three stages — Living Room → Exploration → Living Room — mirror the sound arc: the broken chant of Stage 1 and 2, and the full chant returning in Stage 3.

Buttons / Keyboard

On the website, the game can be played with cursor and keyboard — only simple up / down / confirm.

On the physical machine, the player interacts with six physical buttons mounted on the chanting machine shell: Up, Down, Confirm, Refresh, Volume +, Volume −. There is also a touch screen.

The interaction vocabulary is deliberately small: closer to operating a radio than playing a game.

The two machines: one decision

Both machines — the one running the text adventure, and the one running the recitation — share a single underlying decision. The original infrastructure of each chanting machine has been removed. The original looped recording has been silenced. The shell has been kept. Something else has been placed inside.

Replacement as a method.

The shell stays, the content is replaced, the previous voice falls silent.

This sentence describes both the thesis argument and the two objects you are looking at.

In the text adventure machine, the original infrastructure has been replaced with a Raspberry Pi, a 480×480 circular display, and six custom physical buttons. The original chant has been replaced with the game's sound and three researched archival voices.

In the recitation machine, the battery has been replaced with solar charging. The monk's recording has been replaced with a reworked text I wrote and recorded, voiced as a two-voice piece between the machine and myself.

Making it public

The chanting machine in the altar scene

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 website at project.xpub.nl works as a parallel archive of the chanting machine — interviews, research findings, and the game itself open out into a space that doesn't require visitors to be on-site. 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.

Performance

The recitation is performed once, live, inside the same altar space during the graduation show — I speak over and around the solar-powered machine while it runs its replaced loop.

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 without pausing; I speak over and around it — never replacing it, never merging with it.

The machine voice performs the labour. My voice performs the naming.

Solar power ties the recitation to an external condition: daylight in the room. The work runs as long as the room is lit, and falls silent in darkness. The duration isn't authored — it's environmental.

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 before graduation show.

---

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.

Thanks!