# Intersection-as-Instrument Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/banpo-xism-artist-notes-2025-06-22 Type: essay / research note Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) Date: 2025-06-22 ## Full text INSTRUMENT Each intersection-as-instrument. Complexity, agent-based modelling: simple rules, when aggregated, create complex behaviour. The same goes for an instrument: some rules, and the aggregation of those rules, and complex, emergent behaviour appears. Like piano keys... combinatorial, built up combinatorially. An instrument? What are the rules of an instrument? There are rules of playing, and you build up while following them. Playing imposes constraints, but within them it offers infinite flexibility. And out of that infinite flexibility comes the player's own unique combination... music, art. "The use of tools." A tool limits, but by limiting it opens up a world of endless possibility. Combinatorial explosion! DNA, genetics (A, T, C, G). Chords: finite. Sparks of Genius (Saenggak-ui tansaeng): pattern formation. LEGO. LEGO and the piano: things you can build up completely. "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology": Gunpei Yokoi. Withered technology: already existing tools, individual elements. Lateral thinking: building up combinations, inducing emergence. Building a sort of playground where the audience can naturally, intuitively enjoy and combine. Affirmation, Dionysian affirmation! Play! Nietzsche's child! Intersection-as-Instrument Each intersection works as an instrument, as one part of an instrument. Several interactions, the most intuitive, phenomenological, bodily interaction, yet at the same time contaminating the semantic layer. Like keys on a keyboard, each intersection is an instrument. Two dimensions of the instrument: - Single intersection: specific degrees of freedom in the interaction within each intersection (one instrument). - Inter-intersection (multiple intersections, simultaneous interactions): when several intersection-interactions cross one another, another layer of emergence and harmony comes out of it. Two instruments, three instruments. A quartet, a symphony. Each place, each interaction. Some kind of interaction that is easy to use. One interaction alone is fun enough. But with more than two, chords, harmony and collage appear. Playing the city, the intersection, the cityscape like an instrument. Shaking, periodicity, waves. Sparks of Genius: pattern formation. The combination of the simplest elements generates the complex. Get hints for primal instrumental interaction from African instruments, old instruments, primitive tribal instruments. Some periodicity, some flow. The Fourier transform: the superposition of many waves, complex patterns. Again shaking, periodicity, waves... setting these parameters up well is what matters. Map-intersection control: which parameters are in it? Which parameter feels natural to interact with? Which parameters are good for combining with each other? There must be an interaction that is neither complicated nor unintuitive, simple yet able to stack up into chords, one you do not tire of even after playing for a long time. A new way of sensing the city (the city's entropy) through the body, phenomenologically, through embodied interaction. Inducing complex behaviour from the combination of single patterns, instruments and parameters! Rhythm is the key! Wave-ness, jazz. Reduce directorial elements and explicitly given storyline elements as far as possible; build only rhythmic combinations and connections (minimally), and then let complex patterns arise on top of those connections. The sense of pattern: kinaesthetic, phenomenological, and auditory. Marshall McLuhan: touch. Touching with the eyes (Cezanne). Mitchel Resnick (MIT Media Lab), LEGO Papert Professor. Mindstorms. Complexity in simplicity: LEGO, Tinkertoys, Erector, Meccano, K'Nex. Each intersection acts as a node, an instrument, a piano key. Genes, DNA. The periodic table, elements. Music and tactility: interaction is tactile and at the same time musical. Overtones, harmonics. How do I make the single-intersection instrument? How do I achieve inter-intersection harmonics? Christopher Alexander (British architect): "A City Is Not a Tree". The semi-lattice structure. Intersection, inter-flux. --- 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.