# 도시의 냄새에 대하여 Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/banpo-xism-artist-notes-2025-06-23 Type: essay / research note Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) Date: 2025-06-23 ## Full text Projection, dimensional transformation Some kind of lens? (At Seoul Dining.) The flow of traffic outside (Jangchung-ro) reflected in a wine glass. The outside flow, mirrored in a spherical coordinate system. Augmented reality at the intersection: an interactive mobile web AR experience at each intersection. Environment augmentation plus embodied interaction. Fisheye, watery reflection, jolly effect, shiny effect. The limit of current AR: just looking, just a 3D object floating around like a KAWS figure, is not enough. There has to be movement, bodily interaction. The weaknesses of mobile AR: the screen is small, so you cannot really see what you are doing or which objects are there. It is not a problem you solve by tossing a small object onto the AR view. Bring in the best 3D model in the world and patch it in a hundred times: useless. Solutions like that are just AR for the sake of AR, "look, mobile AR like this is possible". There must be some bodily interaction, active interaction! Shaking, say, or voice pitch. And through it the environment, the cityscape itself, becomes artistic. I need interaction that anyone finds fun, intuitive and instrumental. Smell and the intersection What do I want to say through each intersection, each crossroads? Crossroads-instrument. Every crossroads (every neighbourhood) has its own smell and scenery. This symbolises the Yeongdeungpo dynamics. Scenery and atmosphere lead to the most powerful poetic sense: smell. Smell is re-enacted through touch (interaction) and through sight and sound (audiovisual output). Since I cannot implement smell directly, I stage the olfactory experience through touch, sight and hearing. What I ultimately want to create through the intersection-instrument is a reproduction of touch, sight and sound! Audiovisual collage Joseph Kosuth: Five Fives. A word collage? Something like crosswords? The relevant words gradually appearing? Huge combinations, word combinations. Typographic experiments. Mix and mingle. Collage: intersections among intersections. Harmony among instruments: a first-order instrumental effect (a single intersection, one instrument) and a second-order instrumental effect (multiple intersections, multiple instruments). Each interactive unit, multiple intersections. Phone-as-instrument, intersection-as-instrument. All acting independently, yet cohesively, interacting, as different collaged aspects of the city, YDP. Turing patterns, morphogenesis: Alan Turing. Patterns in nature, such as stripes and spirals, can arise naturally from a homogeneous, uniform state. Complex adaptive systems: they possess simple rules and attributes; they are largely autonomous, with only local knowledge; as constituent parts of a larger system they are easily replaced by similar agents without disrupting the emergent behaviour of the system. Plotting the overall diagram Yeongdeungpo: dynamics, an alternative to the "Gangnam way of life". In practice, a mixture of many neighbourhoods: mix and mingle. From the urban dynamics point of view: urban data science and city complexity science (A City Is Not a Tree). How? An instrumental interface: one and many users, each intersection activated, one or many intersections. The user plays, interacts with, the intersection as an instrument. Input: an RFID tag at each intersection. The user accesses it by phone. Playing the instrument. Intuitive AR, bodily, embodied interaction. Possibly integrate Naver Labs Twin XR. Playing YDP? Which modalities to use? Output: real-time output. Collage. Multiple channels, each depicting a different part of YDP. - One node: an instrument, a simple and playful interaction in itself (a solo recital). - Two nodes: harmony starts to emerge. - Three nodes or more: a complicated system, interaction, a cross-dissolving pattern. Agent-based system, fractal, incremental pattern. On the smell of the city The perception of the city: sight, hearing, smell. Together these are understood as "the smell of the city". And as a result it appears as touch (interaction), and as sight and hearing (output). And 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, the intersection An anonymous means of transport like the subway is a truly modern phenomenon (in Benjamin's sense). Starting with the very idea of digging a railway underground! The subway... what a beautiful element of the city. The railway itself is one huge urban collage. Modalities to use Finger skating, scrolling, parole (speech), screaming, shaking the phone, pressing. They must allow a simple, combinable, instrument-like experience. It should be Dadaistic, playful, almost brutal... The fundamental principle (a psychoanalysis of the city) City, chaos, thermodynamic machine. Seen at a more fundamental level: the flow of order seals off the world of chaos and temporarily delays it. So this "chaos" is the source of power, and a little of it leaking out bit by bit is necessary for energy to circulate. Chaosmos: Deleuze, rhizome. Chaos castrated becomes the system. The modern disciplinary society vs. the contemporary achievement society (Byung-Chul Han), and its link with complexity science. Hubs of traffic Intersection: a path intersecting with another path. The encounter of two different scents. Different directions, different smells, different wills (Yeongdeungpo-ro meeting Yeoui-daero, Gyeongin-ro meeting Yeongdeungpo-ro: wills converging, diverging, colliding. The same with Yeouido station, where lines 5 and 9 meet). Paths: capillaries, veins, arteries (Venice). Plant cell tissue, the urban tissue of Paris. Flows, flux... flux... flux: the intersection. A multidisciplinary project - City and architecture: psychoanalytic and philosophical analysis, and urban analysis (junkspace: Koolhaas). - Philosophy: Benjamin's Einbahnstrasse (One-Way Street), Byung-Chul Han and others. - Complexity science: urban data science, smart cities, urban ecology; agent-based modelling, instrumental modelling (small to whole, emergence). - Digital twin: 3D city, AR exploration. - Implementation: engineering. - Design: interaction design, Multi-Device Web Artwork implementation. Complexity theory Maximising movement and circulation: the modern city (Jang Yong-soon). Yeongdeungpo: a giant shopping mall? Complex systems, complexity science: why the renewed attention around 2020? From the point of view of transport: highways, train stations, terminals. Helping smooth circulation is good. The moment it stops, losses occur. The non-stop city. --- 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.