LING'XIAO

Posara (2026)

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Posara is a visualaudio toolkit for creatives — a runtime built on the Abrase / Myriad computation core, with early MacOS aesthetics at heart. Carts are written in Abrase, hot-reloaded while you play.

It speaks to both machines and browsers: designed for hardware (bare metal wip) and the Web.

▶ Try it in the web playground — write and run Abrase carts live in the browser, or drop a .pk cartridge.

Screen — 1-bit framebuffer
Audio — 4 channels: sample + pitch + stereo volume + ADSR
MIDI — note in / out, talk to your synths
Controller — 8-button bitmap + keys

Other showcase carts include a sequencer cart driving a tracker over MIDI — patterns composed in one screen play and mutate in the other. Written in pure abrase in ~200 lines.

Source is now open at github.com/KHN190/Posara.

A first album made with Posara is up on SoundCloud: Posara Vol. 1.

赤藍 · Posara Vol.1

Medium: Software.

Date: Jun, 2026

Abrase (2026)

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Abrase is a rust-like programming language with algebraic effects, no GC and leak-free by design. Source compiles to Polka bytecode and runs on the Myriad runtime — a small computation core that embeds in any Rust application, or in the browser via WebAssembly.

Try it in the playground — examples are little tutorials, ordered from recursion to nested effect handlers.

Why did I make it? - It is faster than CPython, with better control of hardware than JS and Lua, independent of or embeded to web, simpler than Rust yet proved efficient language features, aesthetic, old-school, and is made for LLM collaboration. Is this good enough?

Source on GitHub, design notes in the wiki.

Medium: Programming Language.

Date: Jun, 2026

A Fool's Performance (2026)

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An unofficial performance at an art fair, about four hours, I dressed as Chibi Maruko-chan, with a poster offering to rent myself for anything at $1 per 10 mins.

By taking the form of Chibi Maruko-chan — a cute, beloved ordinary girl who was watched on TV with popularity at my childhood — and the offering of rental, I dispositioned myself under the power of the audience. The familiar, harmless figure became a vessel for whatever the viewer wished to play with.

A virtual auction followed, where people could tag anybody anything. Most people hated me - I received 10+ tags — with calling of commercialism trap, complaints of “cheap value” and “used-ups”. The only positive tag came from a teen, who liked me for the clown dressing.

Despite, I felt unsatisfied with retreated engagement of audiences. I intended to perform it again on street in the near future.

Date: May, 2026

Five Kafkas in a Zoo (2026)

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On April 19, 2025, six of us — five Kafkas and a child — went to a Zoo in Chengdu. We read the day’s news under a bamboo grove, then wandered. Afterwards we uploaded photographs, fragments and diaries to are.na, and from those traces I edited a stage script in the form of a theatre dialogue.

The recording below is a reading of that script. Each participant is voiced by a deceased artist or writer, all of whom — in this Chinese rendition — speak with a strong countryside accent. Some sound from Northeast China, and some sound like a Cantonese local.

Your browser does not support the audio element.

AI naturally presents an alienated feel — a kind of Kafka-world quality.

There is another thread in it though. In the diaries we collectively submitted, a child shrieks at the giraffe — I’ll pull off your legs — and immerses himself in it with pleasure.

Many of us work hard to prove they are real humans. People try to prove it in their relationships, in their families, to their browsers. But it should be an undoubtable question. The doubt itself, is a reflection of what a person themself is.

I felt AI’s texture is what presents it into the visible. Although, it remains unclear how to improve the work to be more articulated.

Cast of voices

rui-ya — Simone de Beauvoir
Lia — Frida Kahlo
Lingxiao — Nam June Paik
苗子 — Sylvia Plath
breobyhnaug — Susan Sontag
小马 — Isamu Noguchi
default / narrator — Virginia Woolf

Stage script

The full bilingual text — diary entries, a Wallace Stevens poem, a black swan poem, fragments of Kafka’s diaries, and the recruitment notice — is available as a plain text file: Download the script (.txt).

Black swan, black swan
Refusal of conceptual
Refusal of concept entering another man
When someone was showering a rain under the tree
Anubis weighed their heart with a feather

Within a few hours of digital companion
Someone spoke softly
And felt good about keeping up so
Full humanity had the clarity of
not needing anything else

Maybe, a concept says, it’s not crazy
Different cities will visit him
Like leg-pinched dreamtigers

The double exiled
Refuses the entering of concept
The digital the analog the cinnamon smell
Black swan, black swan

Participants: rui-ya, Lia, Lingxiao, 苗子, breobyhnaug, 小马, and 超酱 (the kid).

License: CC BY-NC 4.0

Date: April, 2026

Invisible Water (2025)

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Invisible Water is a device that projects an imagined industrial soundscape into a theatre space. It also incorporates the site-specific history of the exhibition through a miniature landscape.

A brief of the project:

The full length of the device video is at the end.

Materials

A 3D-printed box with a camera, a yarn ball, a virtual body of water. Within the theatre space, it is surrounded by a pile of river stones.

USB Camera: 60 fps, 120 FOV, 720p
3D-printed device: 2mm resin
Raspberry Pi / MacBook Pro
Cobblestones from Dujiangyan, a 2250 year old ancient irrigation system riverbed
Cat stick + blue yarn ball
Theatre audio system

Exhibition

The installation is situated in an art space—a converted factory now used as a theatre—located behind the Manjusri Monastery in Chengdu. The space is approximately 15x20 meters with a 12-meter vertical clearance. The device box is placed within the pile of cobblestones. Viewers are invited to step forward and interact with the device. The sounds of the virtual water body are projected into the entire space via the speaker system, thus translating the movement within the box to the surrounding environment.

Production

Early prototype can be found at:

The camera is mounted on the bottom of the box, tracking the yarn ball’s current position and movement within a virtual body of water inside the box. When the viewer manipulates the “fishing pole” (scratching post) to drop the ball onto the virtual water’s surface, its depth and movement in the water are delineated by sound. The water’s bottom contains a static coordinate zero point and a moving, traceable “Telegraph Sound Source” for interaction. When the yarn ball and the Telegraph Sound Source’s movements synchronize, lifting the ball out of the water triggers the sound of dogs barking and running around the yarn ball “prey.”

The software is completed in Unity, with sound elements created through recording, synthesis, and editing in Audacity.

Theatre

Collaboration: Lyu Lu

Date: Oct, 2025

El Potrero (2025)

Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I was a software engineer until 2025. I worked in industry since 2017, while now a digital artist mainly working on a personal project in a remote Mexico village El Potrero, down in San Luis Potosi. I’ve made a few videos for personal recording, with a photo gallery on site, where you can view the videos here.

It is near an abandoned Spanish era silver mining town Real de Catorce, where you navigate through a lot of ruins in mountains. Tornados, cactuses, horses, deserts, peace and hearts among people are all there it has.

I recreate the ghost town through 3D scans, sound recordings, poems and puzzles driven by an image classification AI. It brings audiences to different places by asking questions and reading your drawings.

The desert is sacred to Huicol people, which has been elevated as an UNESCO cultural heritage in 2025, for the presence of Peyote cactus and being the place for hosting hikuri pilgrimage. I lived in a friend’s house Casa de Pirules, which has been built by him by hand since 17 years ago.

Early access.

Date: May, 2025

Sustainable Computing

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

One day ago, I read a tweet about “frugal (sustainable) computing”, which talked about the increasing energy consumption of machines.

One Serious Problem (2020)

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

One Serious Problem is another very short video game based off a statement by Albert Camus “There’s only one serious philosophical problem”. You can sit and wander around the small virtual room and maybe find a hidden door to the outside but when you exit the game, you can no longer turn back.

Playable at itch.io.

Medium: Video Game.

Date: Dec, 2020

Light of Darkness (2020)

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Light of Darkness is a very short video game made over a night in December, 2020. The game visualizes several different time scales with virtual installations - a spring, a stellar and a flock of birds - to present the idea that time is a sensible, consistent entity, in contrary to the fractured sense of time in a modern society.

Playable at itch.io.

Medium: Video Game.

Date: Dec, 2020

Mondrian (2020)

Tue, 16 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Mondrian is a puzzle game inspired by Lights Out mechanism with a few short procedural generated levels, made for GMTK Game Jam 2020. You need to align all block colors to clear the level.

Playable at itch.io.

Medium: Video Game.

Date: Dec, 2020