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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 auto-generating-auto-generative-systems

Auto-generating auto-generative systems

2025-03-10

From a system that generates to the generation of systems that generate.

From serving the system to making systems serve. From labouring inside its structure to creating structures that labour. From being a subsection to making systems into subsections. From receiving commands to commanding systems. From consuming their products to generating systems that consume.

From the constraints of Industrial Engineering to the possibilities of Industrial Design. From Campbell’s Soup Cans to the generation of XXXX’s YYY ZZZZ.

The end of Industrial Engineering. Rest in peace, Taylorism.

If artificial intelligence can contribute to humanity, one possibility lies here: automatically generating systems that themselves generate. Their contexts can change; their mechanisms can be simulated, replaced and multiplied.

The twentieth-century industrial doctrine asked people to serve a large system because scale made it efficient. What happens when individuals can produce systems from their own hands? If one system attempts to dominate us, can we construct another against it? Generate, generate the generator, generate the generation of the generator.

In my deliberately exaggerated contrast, the twentieth century makes the human part of the factory. The twenty-first puts factories in our hands. We should not stop at owning one: we can create factories, factory-generating algorithms, and algorithms that generate those algorithms.

Stop accepting the same Corbusian square as the inevitable form of living. Generate alternative arrangements. Let modules become particular rather than interchangeable.

Stop assuming the grid and the familiar interface are the only ways to act. Use language-based engineering to produce other interfaces, including interfaces particular to a person or situation.

Stop at neither the soup’s flavour nor the can’s label. Change the container, ingredients, brand, category and ritual of consumption. Generate the terms of the product, not only an option within them.

Stop treating the large corporation as the only possible organisation of work. Imagine producing your own engineering, marketing, sales and administrative systems, then creating relationships of exchange between them.

Taylor placed the system before the person. I want to reverse that proposition: the person comes first, and systems follow. We no longer merely inhabit mass production. We produce the mass—and the machinery that makes it.

But hyper-customisation can conceal another form of standardisation. Ask whether you are customising the system or the system is customising you. A service may claim to be uniquely yours while fitting you ever more tightly to its categories. Resist that reversal. Make the system adjustable.

The old structure begins with principles, builds a system that obeys them and reproduces its outputs. The alternative generates principles, gives them a system, and tests whether that system can work. There need not be one final correct arrangement. The systems themselves become simulations that can be compared, inhabited and replaced.

Auto-generating auto-generative systems. Auto-generating the auto-generative. Again, and again, and again.

Reference retained from the original notes: https://www.chosun.com/opinion/specialist_column/2025/03/07/FABBSDS32RACXFY3STNEF44V6I/

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