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
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 came out of the fieldwork trip back to China, which is the text adventure story began.
The chanting machine prototype is within decker, caming out of testing how the game could live inside the original housing.
A text adventure in Decker
Side notes of buddha machine
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 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.
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.
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.
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. <pre> [PROLOGUE: outside the door] │ (Action: I push the door open.) ▼ ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ STAGE 1: Living Room (the present: a body at standstill, inflamed) │ └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │ ├───► [worship cabinet] ──► [Guanyin] ──► [incense burner] ──► [fruit offering] │ │ │ │ │ (Action: I touch the casing.) ◣──────────────────────────────┘ │ └──► [nianfoji (Silent Phase 1 & 2)] │ ├───► [tea table] ──► [porcelain cup] / [prayer beads] │ │ │ └──► [medicine bottles] (main thread: the mother's ageing body) │ └───► [old stereo] ──► [calendar] (main thread: the silent sediment of time) │ ▼ ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ 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] (Action: I drop the half-open bag.) │ │ │ ├──► [medical report] (main thread: my body overloaded, diagnosis assembly-lined) │ │ │ │ │ ├──► [results / data list] (Action: I scan the metrics.) │ │ │ │ │ └──► [processed label] (Action: I flip the medical page.) │ │ │ ├──► [laptop] ──► [image of the nianfoji shell] (Action: I zoom in on the display.) │ │ │ │ │ ├──► [misprinted text] (Action: I track the offset logo.) │ │ │ │ │ │ │ └──► [loose internal structure] (Action: I click the internal view.) │ │ │ │ │ └──► [the boss and the workers] (Action: I expand the interview note.) │ │ │ │ │ └──► [worldly benefit] (Action: I cross-reference the date.) │ │ │ └──► [iPad] ──► [circuit board, main view] (Action: I slide open the video frame.) │ │ │ ├──► [exposed pins] (Action: I point at the bare metal.) │ │ │ │ │ └──► [photoresistor] (Action: I touch the copper trace.) │ │ │ └──► [single chip] (Action: I trace the sealed logic.) │ │ │ └──► [no way in / sealed seam] (Action: I compare the old and new board.) │ └───► 【Toward: Kitchen & Balcony】 │ ├──► [kitchen] ──► [cold stove] / [assorted thermos flasks] │ ├──► [bathroom] (Action: I step on the wet floor.) │ └──► [balcony] ──► [tropical plants] / [drying rack] │ └──► [neighbour's lotus-shaped player] (Mogu entry point: hardware disassembly & contest over naming) │ └──► [modified MP3 module] ──► [mirrored installation] │ ▼ (Once the factory, laptop, iPad and balcony paths have all been unlocked by the protagonist's touch) ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ STAGE 3: Back to the Living Room (Phase 3: returning, re-engagement) │ └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │ └───► [the broken nianfoji] │ │ (Action: I press both hands onto the plastic.) ▼ 【THE FINALE】 (Original Sanskrit chant returns, in full) </pre> 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.
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]
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.