『Banpo-Xism』 (2026)

『Banpo-Xism』 (반포자이즘) addresses South Korea’s apartment culture as a contemporary myth in which location and brand operate as coordinates of wealth, status, and aspiration. The work translates this into a multi-device web artwork in which audience mobile phones are synchronized with surrounding screens. Audiences first scroll through an SNS-like feed of fictional apartment complexes arranged by location and brand. Each scroll updates the surrounding screens as a step toward higher coordinates, while remaining confined to a flat apartment plane. Later, mobile interactions collectively deform this field into higher-dimensional geometric forms, shifting coordinates, prices, and textual hierarchies across the installation. Thus, 『Banpo-Xism』 makes social myth visible as a coordinate system audiences enter, perform, and destabilize.

Banpo-Xism (반포자이즘), a term coined by the artists, names this contemporary Korean social thread: a blind, zero-sum competition toward the same idealised real-estate coordinate of location (L) and brand (B). Within this L-B plane, people compare, compete, and pursue higher coordinates. This recalls Abbott’s satirical novella <Flatland>, in which two-dimensional beings mistake their plane for reality, unable to imagine dimensions beyond it. From a higher-dimensional view, however, Flatland’s laws appear narrow, arbitrary, and almost absurd. 『Banpo-Xism』 experiments with a similar proposition: Banpo-Xi, the apparent ultimate coordinate of success, may be only a flattened projection of a larger higher-dimensional field.

Through iterative mathematical, geometric, and interaction trials, the artists designed the following system: 『Banpo-Xism』 begins on a two-dimensional L-B plane containing 19 x 19 apartment complexes. Lower-value complexes occupy the bottom-left, while Banpo-Xi sits at the upper-right, with prices ranked according to each apartment’s L/B position. Audience members enter a custom mobile web app, beginning with an Instagram-like vertical feed: a synthetic real-estate social-media world of fictional apartment posts and status-anxious comments such as, “Honestly, people’s faces change when I say I live in Banpo-Xi.” As they doom-scroll, their (L, B) coordinate moves upward. The same movement is updated in real time on surrounding screens, where multiple audience members appear at once, blindly competing to reach the upper-right.

Yet the moment they click an advertisement, “Enter a higher-dimensional world,” they slip out of the two-dimensional plane. Each link reveals a hidden variable beyond L/B, opening an adjustable dimension. As these dimensions are adjusted, the flat apartment plane begins to fold, spin, scatter, and come alive as a differentiable manifold. By touching, shaking, and shouting into their phones, audience members turn hidden constants into interactive parameters, adding dimensions and deforming the field of apartments.

Drawing on differential geometry, 『Banpo-Xism』 gives mathematical form to a world beyond the flatness of the L-B plane. As the manifold is projected back onto the L-B coordinate, apartment prices fluctuate, revealing Banpo-Xism’s hierarchy as a lower-dimensional projection of a higher-dimensional value system.