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Jeanyoon Choi (b.1999) is a Computational Artist researching in interconnectivity and complexity through Multi-Device Web Artworks.

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jeanyoon.ch@oi /oi % cat abstraction-and-system-creation

Abstraction and System Creation

2025-03-18

Photography threatened painting's role as a means of reproducing the visible world. Yet the following century brought an extraordinary expansion of painting and art: abstraction, modernism, minimalism, Pop, and the many departures that followed. A camera could reproduce appearances; artists such as Mondrian and Kandinsky transformed the world into other arrangements of form and thought.

I wonder how much our education actually teaches this movement between the concrete and the abstract. Mathematics can model the world and discover relationships that extend beyond an individual case. In practice, it is often taught as the manipulation of formulas within a closed logical space. Research can fall into a similar condition: increasingly refined local problems, with little connection to the world that made the inquiry meaningful.

Art education can also turn abstraction into classification. We learn the names of warm and cold abstraction, artists, movements, and styles, without necessarily learning how a concrete experience becomes an abstract structure—or how an abstract structure can return to the world as an experience. The transformation itself is what interests me.

Artificial intelligence raises a related challenge. If a machine can perform the established operations of a discipline, human work cannot rely only on performing those operations more efficiently. We need to move across domains, recognise patterns between them, and create relationships that were not given in advance. I think of this as a difference between working vertically within an existing structure and moving horizontally to construct another one.

That would require changes in education, institutions, and the systems through which we value work. The history of painting did not end with better image-making technology; it changed through artists who questioned what an image and an artwork could be. Picasso, Duchamp, and Malevich were not simply more proficient technicians. Research faces its own version of that distinction: producing papers within an established procedure, or investigating questions that force the procedure itself to change. Which side of that history do we want to inhabit?

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