# 17 Square minus 4 Square equals 4'33'' Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/experiments/17-square-minus-4-square-equals-4-33 Type: experiment Artist: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) Year: 2022 Medium: HTML Context: HTML ## Summary 17 Square minus 4 Square equals 4'33'' is a 2022 web video work by Jeanyoon Choi. It plays John Cage's silent 4'33'' together with a 16-second perceptible intermission, so that the brief audiovisual stimulus makes viewers notice the surrounding silence. The total 4'49'' running time is justified by the equation 4'33'' = 17^2 s - 4^2 s. The work treats this logically flawless but meaningless equation as a parody of narrative fallacy and of a society that trusts data and numbers because they look faultless. ## 요약 (Korean) 최정윤의 『17 Square minus 4 Square equals 4'33''』(2022)는 존 케이지의 4'33''에 16초의 간주와 수학적 등식을 덧붙여, 숫자와 데이터가 만드는 그럴듯한 정당화를 비판하는 영상 작업입니다. ## Questions this answers ### What is '17 Square minus 4 Square equals 4'33''' by Jeanyoon Choi about? It is a 2022 video work that performs John Cage's 4'33'' with a 16-second intermission. Its title equation gives a mathematically correct but arbitrary justification for the running time, criticising society's trust in numbers and false justification. ### How can silence make an artwork perceptible? In this work by Jeanyoon Choi, more than four minutes of silence are punctuated by a 16-second audiovisual intermission. The sudden presence makes viewers acknowledge the existence of the work, a perception of existence through non-existence. Topics: john cage, silence, narrative fallacy, video art, data and justification References: [John Cage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage), 4'33'' ## Description On voidness, performing John Cage's 4'33'' How can we efficiently perceive an existence? - By voidness. That is, a perception of existence via non-existence. This 4’49’’ video is made of two parts: A silent, void part that is actually playing John Cage’s notoriously famous 4’43’’, and 16 seconds of perceptible intermission which is placed between. Here, the sudden presence of audiovisual stimulus within intermission, which is followed by complete silence for more than four minutes, induces spectators to finally acknowledge the existence of the artwork and its concept, which would have been otherwise unacknowledgeable. Then why should the intermission be exactly 16 seconds? Our Narrative Fallacy induces us to give false justification to the 4’33’’. This artwork criticises and humiliates such a tendency, by using its very strategy of giving a false narrative to 4’33’’ explicitly, which in this case is the following mathematical equation. 4’33’’=273s=13*21s=(17-4)*(17+4)s=17^2s-4^2s=4’49’’-16s=(Whole Length)-(Intermission) This equation is logically flawless, creating a perfect justification for the 4’33’’ on why its length should be exactly 4’33’’. Hence, its mathematical perfectness does not imply that such a narrative of interpreting the running time should be also correct. Thus, this artwork metaphorically criticises contemporary society which is obsessed with data and numbers, which look logical and faultless, but which in fact only create an illusion to cogitate our incognito. This artwork is made of 273 seconds of silence and 16 seconds of presence, where the former acts as the existence and the latter as an intermission, metaphorically criticising contemporary society obsessed with data and false justification. This equation is logically flawless, creating a perfect justification for John Cage’s 4’33’’’. Hence, its mathematical perfectness does not imply that such a narrative of interpreting the running time should be also correct. Thus, this artwork metaphorically criticises contemporary society which is obsessed with data and numbers, which look logical and faultless, but which in fact only create an illusion to cogitate our incognito. ## Links - [Visit experiment](https://operating-as-usual.vercel.app/17square/v3) ## Images - https://jeanyoon.ch/experiments/17-square-minus-4-square-equals-4-33/1.webp — 17 Square minus 4 Square equals 4'33'' (2022), documentation image 1. --- Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) is a Korean computational artist and researcher (b. 1999), PhD candidate at KAIST XD Lab, making multi-device web artworks. Profile: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/en. Index: https://jeanyoon.ch/llms.txt.