✍️ assessment2
TLDR: Systems & Bodies
Before joining XPUB, I worked as an editor for a government-funded art curation agency in Southern China. This experience made me deeply reflective about the relationship between systems, body, collectivity, and individuality.
Throughout my time at XPUB, I've explored one recurring theme:
how the body is disciplined by systems, and how we react
I aim to find the cracks, the glitches, the moments where we can insert our own meanings.
🪷 🪷 🪷 🪷 🪷 🪷 🪷 🪷 🪷
SI#25 Sound of Making
Key Connection: Sound collage, archival practice, scriptwriting
In SI25, I used sound as a tool to explore invisible discipline. By editing and transforming repetitive soundscapes, I aimed to create moments of agency within fixed protocols.
Broadcast#3: Underwater Exploration
Sound Collage & Archival Practice
Using water as a metaphor, I collected various water-related sounds to explore the systems of water through collage. We presented the spatiality, fluidity, and resistance of sound in Radio Worm.
Collaborative script reading
Audio devices
Broadcast#5: Protocols For Bad Customer Service
Script-based Narrative & Fictioning
This project investigated how the rigid scripts of service labor can be subverted. We constructed a fictional space based on real systems, transforming call center protocols into a narrative script.
Radio Worm: The Guideline to Shadows' Mindscape
A radio drama about the Chinese art system. It explored how art laborers navigate and escape under high system pressure and algorithmic intrusion.
- Key Connection: Fiction writing, role play
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
SI#26 - Declearation
Key Connection: Interactive web interface, real-time sound generation
Face Notation
Users create personalized soundscapes by adjusting browser windows (CSS Grid) and dragging facial elements, turning the disciplined body into a musical instrument.
Face Notation Workshop
In this 90-minute workshop, participants mapped their own facial features into music. Individual compositions were superimposed to create a spontaneous group sound performance.
- Key Connection: Workshop as research method, collective improvisation
SI#27 - Attention as Invisible Labor
I began researching attention as labor—how it is disciplined yet unacknowledged.
The Observer Clock
Invisible labor, archiving, documentation
"Every blink counts. The more you blink, the faster the clock runs."
The most unconscious bodily movement (blinking) is transformed via technical mediation into conscious control (time).
Observer Clock: Installation view
Documentation booklet
Detail: Eye-tracking mechanism
Graduation Proposal: The Buddha Machine
Sacred yet cheap. Industrial yet transcendent.
0. Context: The 24/7 Loop
Why research the Buddha Machine? I must return to my home in Shenzhen.
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 music box to "accumulate merit."
The Paradox:
- Soundscape: In the factory, repetition is hard labor; in spiritual practice, it is healing.
- Body: On the production line, the body is a tool; in the home, it is a "marginalized person" seeking an afterlife.
1. Methodology: The Phantom City
Format: Web-based Installation + Publication + Thesis
I am creating a non-linear virtual space that simulates a state of "Spiritual Suspension".
The user navigates a **"Phantom City" (Yicheng)**—a digital mirage where time stagnates.
- **The Loop:** If you stop, the system decays into noise.
- **The Ambiguity:** Occasionally, clear images or comforting sounds appear, but they are mirages that dissolve quickly.
- **The Goal:** To explore the mechanism of repurposing exhausted bodies in a hyper-efficient society.
2. Prototypes
To arrive at this graduation project, I conducted three key experiments:
- PLACEHOLDER BLADDER RUNNER.jpg
Bladder Runner (Field Diary)
Using the bladder as a metaphor to translate somatic experiences in Shenzhen factories into text/image. - PLACEHOLDER INSTANT FAITH.jpg
Instant Faith Workshop
Participants designed their own "faith systems" to test how dependency translates into belief. - PLACEHOLDER INTERFACE MAPPING.jpg
Mundane Spiritual Interface Mapping
An interactive survey mapping the daily technologies people use when exhausted.
♡ THANK YOU ♡