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.
What the machine loops is never only sound: it carries the labour and the choices of the people who recorded and made it. The machine might take on the spiritual work technologically, but not the act of naming that gives it meaning.
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.
