User:Wyn/T6 Assessment

hii not working the page yet:

1. your individual contributions to the special issues (where relevant to your final project),
   • SI25 — Sound of Making · Protocol for Bad Customer Service (Call Center) — turning systemic call-center scripts into narrative.
   • SI26 — Declaration · Face_Notation — an interactive website turning the bodily markers of Chinese physiognomy into a sound system (CSS Grid + Web Audio).
   • SI27 — See you many times! · The Observer Clock — an installation where blinking accelerates time; a symbol of invisible labour; documented with weasyprint.
2. the development of your reading/writing practice across the 2 years,
   • From connecting personal experience to a larger social context, toward finding the relation between my own body and the systems around it.
   • Landing point: the field diary Bladder Runner — on the assembly line my mother's body wasn't hers, she learned to "hold it in"; as an immigrant I found myself in the same state.
   • This first-person, object-facing voice became the voice of the game text and the recitation.
3. the development of your prototyping practice across the 2 years,
   • Role play + broadcast editing (SI25) -> soundboard + CSS / Web Audio (SI26) -> Raspberry Pi + basic Python (year 2).
   • In short: from pure sound and web interfaces toward reworking a physical device.
4. your thesis (only a brief overview for context, as this has been assessed separately in depth)
   • My thesis uses two frameworks: encoding/decoding and the politics of naming, taking the nianfoji and my mother (a former Shenzhen factory worker) as its subject.
   • It asks: how does a mass-produced commodity, made inside a strong cultural context, keep being given meaning and losing meaning as it circulates? The object itself carries a powerful backstory. Nominally the machine can take on the repetitive labour, but it cannot complete the act of naming that gives it meaning.
5. your final work and research in the second year The Chanting Machine is two installations reworked from the nianfoji: a mass-produced electronic player, made since the 1990s, that loops Buddhist scriptures and chants, usually shaped like a radio. The nianfoji is one of the Buddhist electronic objects mass-produced in Shenzhen since the 1990s — a city built for speed, which also turned out the radios, DVD players and entertainment devices of an era. The looped voices it plays are recorded from monks and collective chanting, sold as a sacred commodity whose sound purifies a room, blesses, and aids meditation, to be kept at home or carried outside. As it circulates — bought, shipped, passed from hand to hand — it gradually drifts from the context and the stories it came from. (1) The text-adventure game — runs inside a chanting machine's housing: a daughter comes home to fix her mother's broken device and, through the rooms of the house, pieces together a story of the family, the city, and the machine. (Show: shell + 480x480 circular screen + 3 buttons; Raspberry Pi build.) (2) The recitation / performance — the looped recording is replaced with a reworked recitation I wrote for the machine, on a machine that charges for as long as there is light. A two-voice piece (machine / me) — at once an installation and a live performance. Reworked this way, the machine speaks what I chose, and names what it means.
6. plans for final publication and grad show (with the understanding that you will continue to work on this after the assessment) In the first installation, a text adventure runs inside a chanting machine's housing — a daughter comes home to fix her mother's broken device and, through the rooms of the house, pieces together a story of the family, the city, and the machine. In the second, its looped recording is replaced with a reworked recitation, on a machine that charges for as long as there is light. Reworked this way, the machine speaks what I chose, and names what it means. The performance with the chanting machine