jeanyoon.ch@oi ~ % cd /oi

Welcome to jeanyoon.ch/oi

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

You can learn more about my:

↑ ↓ select · enter open · or click / tap

jeanyoon.ch@oi /oi % cat banpo-xism-artist-notes-2025-06

Banpo-Xism Artist Notes: June 2025

2025-06-30

6 June 2025

The project begins as an ode to Yeongdeungpo, and more broadly to urban dynamics. The city here means dynamism, "Yeongdeungpo-ness", restlessness, disorder, generation and destruction, and, out of these, innovation, childlikeness, affirmation: the Dionysian.

Its antithesis is Gangnam, or the Gangnam type. Following the urban philologist Kim Sidoek's account of the "Gangnam way of life", the antithesis is a model of large apartment complexes combined with retail facilities and riverside districts, as in Banpo Xi or Jamsil, and exported nationwide as the new-town model: Ilsan, Sejong, Dongtan, Gwanggyo. This way of life is stereotyped; everyone looks alike. The core of what the notes call Banpo-Xism is to live in identical spaces while desiring minimal marginal differences. Because everyone inhabits the same apartments, the same malls and the same riverfronts, the sameness is so intense that tiny differences are magnified and become objects of obsessive desire. Banpo-Xism is the "Dream of Squares" (Nemoui Kkum, a Korean children's song about a world made of squares): a vast dystopia.

Yeongdeungpo, by contrast, is not Gangnam-like at all. It has apartments, retail and a riverside, but they are disconnected, far from a well-planned city, and its share of green space ranks last. Yet this irregularity, disparity, lack of planning and disorder produce dynamics, energy and change, and its deep history suggests that many cycles of creation and destruction are still to come. It is a place where all these forces intertwine and cross: an archive of modern Korean history and the site where the future of Seoul and South Korea may be born.

If the future of South Korea is the Gangnam way of life, that is, Banpo-Xism, it will mean more uniform people and education, an accelerating obsession with minimal differences, the myth that Gangnam and Seoul never lose value, and a deepening of the country's chronic problems: the low birth rate, concentration in Seoul and polarisation.

Seoul has three cores: the historic centre, Yeongdeungpo and Gangnam. Because the centre is symbolic and can hardly be redeveloped further, Yeongdeungpo has a large role in preventing a unipolar concentration in Gangnam. For that, "Yeongdeungpo-ness", or Yeongdeungpo dynamics, must unfold as a counterweight to the Gangnam way of life: system dynamics, a city that works not as a single planned Euclidean sculpture or Apollonian object but as a disorderly, dynamic, irregular organism.

People in their twenties and in their seventies, families and single households, finance workers and street cleaners, shopping malls and corner shops, twelve-lane roads and narrow back alleys, the KTX and the light rail, members of the National Assembly and foreign residents, high-end French restaurants and bibimbap in a traditional market: Yeongdeungpo is where such opposed values coexist, comparable to the dynamism of Manhattan. This coexistence of opposites, in contrast with Gangnam's exclusivity, is what forms the dynamics, and it connects to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's barbell idea. Real potential appears not in a single uniformity, the equality of everything (with minimal differences and the consumption of signs in between, which is Banpo-Xism), but when the two extremes are mixed: the difference in entropy releases potential, and those dynamics create vitality. Important human discoveries and histories do not arise in Banpo Xi but in dynamism like Yeongdeungpo's.

Interface: a map? In the exhibition space, QR codes standing for each neighbourhood; in the actual city, posters or stickers placed throughout each neighbourhood so that people can reach the QR code corresponding to that place.

An older set of notes asks whether the Yeongdeungpo work should take a map-like interface as input. Not an explicit map: explicit maps lack aesthetic quality and offer no dimensional transformation. Rather an implicit map, either visually map-like yet abstract, or map-like in its interaction: zooming, pinching and rotating, as in three.js orbit-control navigation. But what is the value of a 2D base? If zooming, rotating and pinching serve both 2D maps and 3D scenes, what is the interactive, degrees-of-freedom logic behind them? The hope is that map-like interaction could catch two birds at once: semantics and phenomenology.

The limits of the state of the art: 3D navigation is novel, but beyond rotating there is little meaning in it; scrolling interactions exist, but user agency and flexibility within them are limited. Overcoming these limits means active navigation with a high degree of freedom.

7 June 2025

A list of fields to study: urban data science, the physics of cities, the science of cities, urban physics, network science, and complexity or complex systems science (with the Santa Fe Institute's introduction to complex systems science), together with Michael Batty's institute talk "Complexity and the New Science of Cities".

Emergence is why complexity science matters. Combining the city with network science raises questions of GIS, centrality, traffic flow and urban optimisation, and a set of key notions: emergence, self-organisation, non-linear interaction, feedback loops, resilience, scaling and fractals. For city modelling there are LUTI (land use and transportation interaction) models and agent-based modelling, and the City Science group at the MIT Media Lab with its CityScope project.

12 June 2025

City dynamics as particle systems, or as a complex system? Purely physical representation, or urban statistics in the manner of complex-systems statistics, is insufficient; some interpretation, a dimensional transformation, is needed.

Open questions: should the work centre on Yeongdeungpo or on a general city? Korean map platform APIs (Naver Map, Kakao Map) or global platforms (OpenStreetMap, Mapbox)? Street view or aerial view? Multiple iPads with touch interfaces, naturally multi-user like the Reactable, or phones with multi-phone interaction through QR codes? Pure Euclidean geometry or real city geometry?

The entropy of a city (its creativity and emergence) and its neatness (Banpo-Xism, the new towns) stand in a relation of uncertainty, much as time and space cannot both be fixed at once. Neither is the preferable value; both must coexist within one country.

A resolution written in capitals: the interaction should be Nintendo-like. The notes quote Shigeru Miyamoto: Nintendo is known as a game company but is also a toy company, and a toy must always evoke a feeling of surprise; where other console makers take similar, unified approaches to strengthening hardware, the way to differentiate is to make users feel they are playing with a new toy; and the "fun" he means is whether holding the controller feels just right and whether it makes the player happy, so that controller and screen open new experiences freely. Whom should this surprise address, and to whom should Yeongdeungpo-ness be offered as an alternative to Banpo-Xism? To this generation, people born in the 1990s, who grew up with Nintendo.

17 June 2025

Map-like interaction can pass parameters as (R, Z, P): rotation, zooming and panning. With N users this becomes (R1, Z1, P1) ... (Rn, Zn, Pn). Could there be a network effect between devices, across nC2 pairings?

Interaction options. Option 1, the piano: each key hit either applies directly to a state, in the traditional way, or acts as an event that triggers transitions between states. The result would be a kind of 3D collage, a pastiche. Option 2, a map with RFID chips and mobile access: the mobile site should be meaningful and fun on its own, while through sensory and embodied interaction it also affects its surroundings in real time.

The output screens would be not explicitly a map but a cityscape or collage. Open terms: dynamics, system, semantic layer, navigation, emergence, activation.

18 June 2025

City metabolism, or architectural Metabolism: a modular, skeletal structure resembling the way various devices, mobile and output, can be plugged in and out. "A city is not a tree"? This understanding of the city holds that change never happens in an orderly way; a city exists in a "complex and messy state, as if things overlapped by chance", and so cannot be artificially manipulated.

Visual options. Option 1: a 3D cityscape plus collage, for example 3D buildings whose facades are textured with text (as in The Legible City) or with generative images and video; perhaps a virtual visual that ignores gravity, but then which visual, and why (exaggerations like those of Super Mario)? Option 2: paths and flux, the intersection. The whole need not be a map; what is needed is a particular viewpoint, described in detail, like Shibuya Crossing.

Interaction must be essentially tactile: within the phone itself (in the city) and in the interaction between phone and desktop screens (in the installation, multi-device). In the city, AR? AR must not merely toss an object into the middle of the scene; the whole screen and its surroundings should be augmented, literally a distortion of space. It need not be full AR depicted through real-time detection; a distorted form of the cityscape appearing directly may be enough: speculation on, and augmentation of, the environment itself.

The intersection: each intersection is where all fluxes and flows cross. Walter Benjamin's One-Way Street: a road has direction, from point A to point B, close to The Legible City. Fluxes cross and form a single flow: "catching the advertisements, buildings and events that pass by while walking a one-way street", a kind of signpost rather than boulevard-like thinking. The cityscape would be pastiche and collage: urban structure and tissue, metabolism, network and structure, node-edge links.

What happens at an intersection? What chance, what urban quality? Baudelaire's flaneur, Benjamin's stroller, some collage. Within this, interaction: navigating, performing real-time semantic interaction, and leaving long-term stored data, all very intuitive yet with diverse modalities. A hyperlinked space, a node-link diagram, G(V, E): how does one navigate from one node to another, and is the navigation itself information?

Interaction like a piano: acceptable as percussion at first, but then able to keep triggering chords and interactions that build richer signification and audiovisual collage. Simple choices should be possible, but so should countless combinations: aesthetic, sensory, somewhat obsessive. Reference: Gunpei Yokoi's "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology" at Nintendo.

21 June 2025

Naver Labs Twin XR, a digital twin platform; high-definition map visualisation; and the Naver Labs HD map dataset for autonomous driving.

22 June 2025

Instrument: each intersection as an instrument. In complexity science and agent-based modelling, simple rules, when aggregated, create complex behaviour. The same holds for an instrument: there are rules, and their aggregation gives rise to complex, emergent behaviour, combinatorially built up like piano keys. What are an instrument's rules? There are rules of playing, and one builds up while following them. Playing imposes constraints yet offers infinite flexibility within them, and from that flexibility emerges the player's own combination: music, art. A tool limits, but by limiting it opens a world of endless possibility. Combinatorial explosion: DNA with its A, T, C and G; chords, which are finite. Pattern formation, from Sparks of Genius by Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein; LEGO and the piano as things that can be fully built up.

Gunpei Yokoi again: withered technology means tools and individual elements that already exist; lateral thinking means building up combinations and inducing emergence. The aim is a kind of playground where the audience can naturally and intuitively enjoy and combine: Dionysian affirmation, play, Nietzsche's child.

Intersection-as-Instrument: each intersection works as an instrument, or as part of one, through the most intuitive, phenomenological, bodily interaction, while at the same time contaminating the semantic layer, like the keys of a keyboard. The instrument has two dimensions. The single intersection offers specific degrees of freedom within its own interaction: one instrument. Inter-intersection play, where several simultaneous intersection-interactions cross, produces another layer of emergence and harmony: two instruments, three, a quartet, a symphony. Each place has its interaction; it should be easy, and one interaction alone should be fun enough, but with more than two, harmony, concord and collage appear. One plays the city, the intersection, the cityscape like an instrument: shaking, periodicity, waves.

Pattern formation again: the combination of the simplest elements generates complexity. Hints for primal instrumental interaction might come from African instruments, ancient instruments and tribal instruments: some periodicity, some flow. The Fourier transform describes the superposition of many waves into complex patterns; again shaking, periodicity and waves, and the importance of setting these parameters well. In controlling a map intersection, which parameters exist? Which are natural to interact with, and which combine well? There must be an interaction that is neither complicated nor unintuitive, simple yet able to build harmonies, one that does not tire even after long play: a new way of sensing the city, and its entropy, through the body, phenomenologically, through embodied interaction, inducing complex behaviour from the combination of single patterns, instruments and parameters. Rhythm is key: wave-like, jazz. Directorial elements and explicitly given storylines should be reduced as far as possible; only rhythmic combinations and connections are built, minimally, so that complex patterns can arise on top of them.

A sense of pattern: kinaesthetic and phenomenological, and auditory. Marshall McLuhan on touch; touching with the eyes (Cezanne). Mitchel Resnick of the MIT Media Lab, LEGO Papert Professor, and Mindstorms: complexity within simplicity in LEGO, Tinkertoys, Erector, Meccano and K'Nex. Each intersection acts as a node, an instrument, a piano key, like genes in DNA or elements in the periodic table. Music and tactility: interaction is tactile and at the same time musical, with overtones and harmonics. How can a single-intersection instrument be made, and how can inter-intersection harmonics be achieved? Christopher Alexander, the British architect: "A City Is Not a Tree", the semi-lattice structure; intersections, inter-flux.

23 June 2025

Projection and dimensional transformation as a kind of lens. Observed at a restaurant in Seoul: the flow of traffic outside on Jangchung-ro reflected in a wine glass, the external flow mirrored in a spherical coordinate system.

Augmented reality at intersections: an interactive mobile web AR experience at each intersection, combining environmental augmentation with embodied interaction: fisheye, watery reflection, jolly and shiny effects. The limit of current AR is that merely looking, with a 3D object floating like a KAWS figure, is not enough; there must be movement and bodily interaction. Mobile AR's weaknesses: the screen is small, so it is hard to see what is happening or which objects are there; throwing a small object onto the AR view solves nothing, and patching it with however good a 3D model is useless. Such solutions are AR for the sake of AR, a demonstration that mobile AR is possible. Bodily, active interaction is needed, such as shaking or voice pitch, through which the environment, the cityscape itself, becomes artistic: interaction that anyone finds fun, intuitive and instrumental.

Smell and intersections: what should each intersection say? Every intersection, every neighbourhood, has its own smell and scenery, and this symbolises Yeongdeungpo dynamics. Scenery and atmosphere lead to the most powerful poetic sense, smell. Since smell cannot be implemented directly, the olfactory experience is staged through touch (interaction) and through sight and sound (audiovisual output). What the intersection-instrument ultimately aims to create is a reproduction of touch, sight and sound.

Audiovisual collage: Joseph Kosuth's Five Fives; word collage, something like crosswords, with corresponding words gradually appearing; large word combinations, typographic experiments, mix and mingle. Collage as intersections among intersections, harmony among instruments: a first-order instrumental effect (a single intersection or instrument) and a second-order one (multiple intersections or instruments). Each interactive unit, across multiple intersections, phone-as-instrument and intersection-as-instrument, acts independently yet cohesively, showing different collaged aspects of the city, Yeongdeungpo.

Alan Turing's morphogenesis and Turing patterns: stripes and spirals arise naturally from a homogeneous, uniform state. Complex adaptive systems possess simple rules and attributes; their parts are largely autonomous, with only local knowledge, and as constituents of a larger system they can be replaced by similar agents without disrupting its emergent behaviour.

An overall diagram. Yeongdeungpo: dynamics, an alternative to the Gangnam way of life, a real mix and mingle of diverse neighbourhoods; from the urban dynamics point of view, urban data science and city complexity science (A City Is Not a Tree). How: an instrumental interface for one or many users, with each intersection activated, one or many at once; the user plays the intersection as an instrument. Input: an RFID tag at each intersection, accessed by phone; intuitive AR and embodied interaction; possibly integrating Naver Labs Twin XR. Which modalities would "playing Yeongdeungpo" use? Output: real-time, collage, multi-channel, each channel depicting a different part of Yeongdeungpo. One node is an instrument with simple, playful interaction of its own, a solo recital; two nodes begin to produce harmony; three or more produce a complicated system of interactions and cross-dissolving patterns: agent-based, fractal, incremental.

On the smell of the city: the city is perceived through sight, hearing and smell, understood together as "the smell of the city", which is then expressed through touch (interaction) and through sight and sound (output). There is rhythm in it: blow it, blow it, blow it; tap it, tap it, tap it; point it, point it, point it.

The subway as an intersection: an anonymous means of transport like the subway is a thoroughly modern phenomenon in Benjamin's sense. Even the idea of digging a railway underground is remarkable; the subway is a beautiful urban element, and the railway itself is a vast urban collage.

Modalities to use: finger skating, scrolling, speech, screaming, shaking the phone, pressing. They should allow a simple, combinable, instrument-like experience: Dadaistic, playful, almost brutal.

A fundamental principle, a psychoanalysis of the city: the city as chaos, a thermodynamic machine. At a more basic level, the flow of order temporarily seals off and delays the world of chaos; chaos is therefore the source of power, and a little of it must leak out for energy to circulate. Deleuze's chaosmos and rhizome; chaos castrated becomes the system. Byung-Chul Han's contrast between the modern disciplinary society and the contemporary achievement society, linked with complexity science.

Transport hubs: an intersection is a path crossing another path, the encounter of two different directions, smells and wills. Where Yeongdeungpo-ro meets Yeoui-daero, or Gyeongin-ro meets Yeongdeungpo-ro, wills converge, diverge and collide, as they do at Yeouido station where subway lines 5 and 9 meet. Paths as capillaries, veins and arteries (Venice); plant cell tissue and the urban tissue of Paris; flows, flux, flux, flux, and the intersection.

A multidisciplinary project: city and architecture through psychoanalytic and philosophical analysis as well as urban analysis (Rem Koolhaas's junkspace); philosophy via Benjamin's One-Way Street and Byung-Chul Han; complexity science through urban data science, smart cities and urban ecology, agent-based modelling and instrumental modelling (from the small to the whole, emergence); digital twins, 3D cities and AR exploration; engineering implementation; and design, meaning interaction design and multi-device web artwork implementation.

Complexity theory: Jang Yong-soon on the modern city as the maximisation of movement and circulation. Is Yeongdeungpo a giant shopping mall? Why has complexity science been re-examined around 2020? From the point of view of transport (highways, railway stations, terminals), smooth circulation is good; the moment it stops, losses occur: a non-stop city.

24 June 2025

A good reference: 21 Swings (2011) by Daily tous les jours. It is instrumental, producing cross-collaborating harmony very naturally through instrumental interaction. Each point and each interaction here should be instrumental.

After Marshall McLuhan on touch: well-designed interaction is tactile, very soft and natural, and therefore like an instrument, one that allows rich playing.

How playing begins. At first an unskilled player makes tactile contact with the interface at one intersection, and the resonance of that contact produces the first audiovisual output. The player then engages more actively and learns the rules of playing, the basic causality between touch and audiovisual response, like a child first meeting a piano or a student who has just learned how to tune a guitar. Only then does the player begin to play in the true sense: integrating, crossing, mixing and varying the rules they have established. The interfaces now function as full instruments that offer enough freedom and let those freedoms be combined. The instrument changes the surrounding audiovisual environment: touch controls, and at the same time creates, sight, sound and the immersive experience of the space.

Why use phones? Touching an interface rather than flailing in the air: waves, haptics on the phone, the touch of a surface. "Contact", tactile connection.

The importance of rhythm, after McLuhan: speech carries rhythm, and utterance should attend to the underlying rhythm as much as, or more than, signification itself. What precedes speech is prosody and rhythm, bodily rhythm and movement, a kind of gesture: "all language is the embodiment of bodily gesture, and so dance is the mother of all language". Dancing and rhythm matter; in the end, is playing instruments not dancing (Nietzsche), cultivating one great affirmation?

In every multi-device web artwork installation the audience is a performer. The audience performs the installation, and sometimes co-performs: a quartet, an orchestra.

How can the city be touched? Map-based interaction is common, but is there a more natural one? One possible single interaction unit is the traffic light: every intersection has one, red, yellow, green. What does a traffic light symbolise? Like the like button of the ASC lab, pressed as intuitively as a "like" or "thanks" button: intuitive, one or two dimensions of interaction. With RFID, each position would carry specific axes or parameters.

27 June 2025

Like making a character in a game: each intersection of the city is nurtured, and as one touches the smartphone interface by hand, the city grows? How is that instrumental, and what are the axes of control? Perhaps more like a string instrument, tangible and satisfying to the touch. A crossroads modelled in 3D: do building heights increase? Do business types change? Something more speculative and creative is needed: the folding dream city of Inception, the dimensional scene in Interstellar. Whatever it is must be creative enough to show future urban dynamics; copying the dream city as it is would be foolish, and it must instead be turned into playing in a different way.

Intersection, instrument, interaction: individuals interact at each intersection by scanning a flat RFID chip, and the interaction adjusts specific parameters in an instrumental way, with chord elements and temporal elements. Every scene is a 3D scene, a 3D cityscape of the interaction; finger interaction changes the cityscape and the 3D model, from building heights to distortion, Interstellar-like effects and superposition. The development should be abstract and sculptural, yet make sense and be overwhelming. Like making a character, one builds up the intersection: an accumulation of properties in 3D form. Instrumental interaction with immediate audiovisual feedback across other screens; the accelerometer for AR-like interaction and transitions of scene view.

Why intersections in Yeongdeungpo? The urban character of crossroads: the meeting point of two infinite lines, two roads, and the dynamics and interactivity that occur there.

Possible combinations of interactions: finger interaction, touching as if playing, creative, hyper-real, surreal; the accelerometer for the perspective of the 3D scene, like AR; and potentially language interaction or some more GUI.

The city as play: changing and building the city comes from play, a Nietzschean play of imagination, as in Inception. Playing the city is not possible in a realistic sense; it comes from a dreamlike, surreal image of the city. Hints for such surreal, distorted dimensions can be taken from the avant-garde of the 1960s, from very bold architects. The task is to take their visions as reference and develop an Interactive-Intersection-as-Instrument: the city, or the intersection, played as an instrument through one or two immediately controllable parameters, in combination with endlessly different rhythms from other intersections.

29 June 2025

Christian Marclay's Playing Pompidou. But it is merely playing, merely an experiment, without deeper meaning; the Yeongdeungpo project must find urban and humanistic meaning. Still, Marclay's sampling and collage techniques are useful: sampling aesthetics, interaction-collage, the re-creation of meaning.

Playing each place in the city as an instrument: playing Yeongdeungpo station, playing Mullae-dong, playing Yeouido. If one were to play Yeouido, how would one play it? Playing awakens, grows, makes and casts the city; can it convey a feeling and a meaning of the city at the same time?

From the real to the surreal: making and co-constructing a poetic, abstract city, in which the user's own freedom and flexibility gradually increase, and in which the process of building the instrument combines semantic interaction with surrealism. Togglers? Units for interaction, and collages of those units? Exaggeration, repetition, rhythm: these keywords need deeper thought.

What does it mean to play an instrument? Which urban parameters can become instrumental? Not simply traffic, roads, buildings, pointed objects, but flow; flow is the focus. The city's night and day, its colour, each city's character: endless possibilities. Artistic interpretation, artistic amplification, amplified characteristics are needed: making places and cities into instruments. Making a proper instrument that actually works is the hardest and most gruelling task; it requires the most intuitive (simple is best) yet provocative action. It must function as an instrument and also as part of signification.

Mesh: inspiration from mesh drawing tools, mesh selector and brush tools.

Feedback between phone and system: the phone affects the surrounding screens and the city collage through the system; how does the collage in turn affect the phone? A connection with street art: it could feel somewhat like graffiti.

Amplified characteristics: each urban space has its characteristics. Each destination (Yeongdeungpo, Sindorim, Mullae, Dangsan, Yeouido) has its own smell. These very intuitive characteristics of the city should appear, be emphasised and be illuminated artistically, strongly amplified from an artistic point of view. A good reference is the TikTok account realmadwolf475 and its "POV: You go to ___" videos, which amplify each region's character in collage form (money, a cat character, objects, flags, euros), expressed playfully through the cat character.

30 June 2025

To make an instrument out of the city, one must understand the city completely and identify its most basic, elemental features. What is the city's seven-note scale? What is the city's ACGT? Through what combination of elements can a natural, intuitive and meaningful combinatorial explosion be produced? An urban, architectural and humanistic approach must come first, and must then be linked naturally to interaction, design and 3D development. Studying theories of elements would also help. Christian Marclay's sampling aesthetics, and Playing Pompidou, again.

On the 3D viewpoint: Korean cities, Seoul and Yeongdeungpo, have wide roads, wide intersections and low surrounding building density, so a 3D point of view from the ground might look odd; a view from somewhat above may be better. Manhattan or London have narrow streets and narrow intersections (allowing Times Square-like visuals), whereas Seoul's roads are two to four times wider than London's and its intersections four to sixteen times larger.

↑ ↓ select · enter open · or click / tap
Read original notes back to ../texts ../ back to oi