Welcome to jeanyoon.ch/oi
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 against-rounded-personality-the-lonely-crowd-by-david-riesman
Against Rounded Personality - The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman
2024-03-30
Reading David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, particularly the discussion of socialised preferences in the Korean edition, pages 148–157, I was struck by how extensively peer judgement can organise both consumption and emotional life. The passages I copied concern fear of standing apart, the wish for an ordinary child, possessions as investments in social value, and the increasingly similar ways children and adults consume. These are my notes on those passages, not a quotation from an English edition.
The ‘well-rounded personality’ appears everywhere: job descriptions, recruitment criteria, university admissions. It sounds generous, but I hear another possibility in it—the wish for a person who is readily substitutable. If person A and person B are both acceptably rounded, the institution can exchange one for the other.
We are trained to become rounded by being socialised: following our peers’ trends, learning the same preferences, consuming the same things. We acquire different specialisms while the rest of our lives converge. The result resembles a manufactured personality with a few adjustable features.
This is difficult to reconcile with my reading of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. Such a figure need not be balanced in every respect. They may be weak in one area and forceful in another. A new value does not necessarily emerge from the person most comfortably fitted to existing expectations. What passes as innovation within that fit may be little more than branded innovation.
I want to resist this treadmill of consumption and regression towards the mean—in personality, education and preference. If we train people chiefly to meet an existing template, we also train them to resemble the machines that may perform that template more efficiently. The task is to challenge the preference for roundedness itself.
jeanyoon.ch@oi /oi % cd artworks
Interactive Multi-Device Web Artworks where audiences interact with surrounding screens and projections from their own mobile phones.
jeanyoon.ch@oi /oi % cd projects
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jeanyoon.ch@oi /oi % cd about
Jeanyoon Choi
Jeanyoon Choi (b. 1999) is a Korean computational artist and researcher. He designs and researches multi-device web artworks that reflect the complexity of contemporary socio-technological systems, including AI, algorithmic culture, and economic structures. By interconnecting mobile devices and screens, these artworks create provocatively interactive environments. To develop their conceptual foundations, he draws on art, philosophy, and his scientific background, then uses software engineering and design to translate these ideas into interactive experiences.
He holds a BS in Industrial Engineering from Seoul National University and an MA in Information Experience Design from the Royal College of Art, and is currently a PhD candidate at KAIST's Experience Design Lab (XD Lab). He has also taught Computational Design Practices in the Interaction Design Department at K-Arts (Korea National University of Arts). His work has been exhibited internationally at Ars Electronica, Istanbul Digital Arts Festival, IKLECTIK London, Centre Culturel Coréen, and KAIST Art Museum. His papers have been published in the proceedings of ACM DIS and in the Leonardo journal (MIT Press), and he has served as an academic reviewer for ACM TEI, NeurIPS Creative AI, and Digital Creativity.
You can explore my practice through my artworks, research, experiments, projects, and texts:
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