# 영등포 찬양가

Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/banpo-xism-artist-notes-2025-06-06
Type: essay / research note
Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤)
Date: 2025-06-06

## Full text

An ode to Yeongdeungpo, an ode to urban dynamics.

The city: dynamism, Yeongdeungpo-ness, restlessness, disorder, generation and destruction... and, coming out of all that, innovation, childlikeness, affirmation, the Dionysian.

The antithesis: Gangnam, or the Gangnam type. In the urban philologist Kim Si-deok's account of Gangnam, the "Gangnam way of life" (Gangnam-jeok sam-ui yangsik) is the antithesis. Banpo-Xism: large apartment developments like Banpo Xi or Jamsil, plus retail facilities, plus a riverside district. And this "Gangnam way of life" has been exported nationwide (Ilsan, Sejong, Dongtan, Gwanggyo) as the so-called new-town model. It is stereotyped thinking. Everyone is a lookalike. The core of Banpo-Xism is living in identical spaces while desiring minimal marginal differences. Everyone lives in the same apartments, the same malls, the same riverfronts, and precisely because the sameness is so extreme, the tiniest differences are magnified, and people become obsessed with them. That is Banpo-Xism. And Banpo-Xism is Nemo-ui kkum (Dream of Squares): a vast dystopia.

Yeongdeungpo, by contrast, is not Gangnam-like at all. It has apartments, retail and a riverside, but they are all disconnected, far from a well-planned city, and its share of green space is dead last. Yet this irregularity, disparity, lack of planning and disorder are what finally produce dynamics, energy and change, and its deep history announces that countless cycles of creation and destruction are still to come. A place where all these forces tangle and cross: a record of modern Korean history, and the place where the future (of Seoul, of Korea) will be born.

If the future of Korea is the "Gangnam way of life", that is, Banpo-Xism, it will mean even more uniform people and education, an even greater obsession with minimal differences, an acceleration of "Gangnam never loses, Seoul never loses" (Gangnam bulpae, Seoul bulpae), and a deepening of Korea's chronic problems: the low birth rate, the concentration in Seoul, polarisation.

Seoul's three cores are the historic centre, Yeongdeungpo and Gangnam. To prevent a unipolar concentration in Gangnam, Yeongdeungpo's role is large (the centre is symbolic, and further development there is hardly possible).

For that, Yeongdeungpo-ness, Yeongdeungpo dynamics, must unfold as the rival to the "Gangnam way of life", to Banpo-Xism. System dynamics: Yeongdeungpo is where the city works not as a single planned Euclidean sculpture, an 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, National Assembly members and foreigners, a high-end French restaurant and bibimbap in a traditional market: Yeongdeungpo is where these opposed values coexist (like the dynamism of Manhattan). And this oppositeness (opposed to Gangnam's exclusivity) is exactly where the dynamics form. These dynamics also connect to NNT's (Nassim Nicholas Taleb's) barbell theory.

Not one uniformity, the equality of everything (with minimal differences and the consumption of signs in between: Banpo-Xism), but the mixing of the two extremes: in that difference of entropy real potential appears, and those dynamics create vitality. The important discoveries and histories of humankind do not happen in Banpo Xi; they happen in dynamism like Yeongdeungpo's.

Interface: a map? In the exhibition space, QR codes standing for each neighbourhood (dong). And in the real city space, posters or stickers put up all over each neighbourhood, so people can reach the QR code that corresponds to that neighbourhood or place.

Older notes

YDP (Yeongdeungpo): take a map-like interface as input?
Not explicitly a map. An explicit map has no good aesthetic quality and no dimensional transformation.
Implicitly a map: either visually a map (yet implicit, abstract), or map-like interaction: zoom in and out, pinching, rotating. The same goes for three.js OrbitControls navigation.
But on a 2D basis, what is the value? Why a map, 2D, with zooming, rotating and pinching, when 3D uses the same zooming, rotating and pinching? What is the interactive, degrees-of-freedom logic behind it?
Through map-like interaction: catch two rabbits at once, semantics and phenomenology!

The limits of SoTA: the 3D navigation is novel, but beyond rotating it does not mean much. There is scrolling interaction, but user agency and flexibility within it are limited. Going beyond these limits: active navigation, a guaranteed high degree of freedom.

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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. Index: https://jeanyoon.ch/llms.txt.