# 관객이 곧 연주자다

Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/banpo-xism-artist-notes-2025-06-24
Type: essay / research note
Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤)
Date: 2025-06-24

## Full text

A good reference: 21 Swings (2011, Daily tous les jours). Instrumental! It makes cross-collaborating harmony very naturally through instrumental interaction. Each point, each interaction here will be instrumental.

Marshall McLuhan: touch. Well-designed interaction is tactile. Tactile, very soft and natural. And so well-designed interaction is like an instrument. Like an instrument, and capable of rich playing.

How playing begins

At first, an unskilled player makes contact, tactile contact, with the interface (one intersection). And the resonance that this contact produces in that moment makes the first sounding, the first audiovisual output.

Then the player makes contact more actively, and comes to grasp the laws of playing, that is, the basic causality between touch and sight-and-sound. (A child meeting a piano for the first time; a university student who has just learned how to play the guitar.)

Only then does this player begin to "play" in the true sense: integrating, crossing, mixing and varying the rules and laws they have established. Now the interfaces function as full instruments that offer enough degrees of freedom, and that are built up by mixing those freedoms.

This instrument changes the surrounding environment (the audiovisual). Touch controls, and at the same time creates, sight, sound and the immersive experience in the space.

Why use a phone? Touching an interface vs. flailing around in the air. Waves, haptics on the phone. The tactility of touching a surface. "Contact", tactile connection.

The importance of rhythm: Marshall McLuhan

Speech leads to rhythm. In the end, an utterance should attend to the rhythm beneath it as much as (or even more than) the signification itself. What comes before words: prosody, rhythm, bodily rhythm, bodily movement. A kind of gesture. "All language is the embodiment of bodily movement, and so dance is the mother of all language." This dancing matters; the sense of rhythm matters. Instruments: in the end, is it not about dancing (Nietzsche), cultivating one great affirmation?

Every MDWA installation: the audience is a performer. The audience performs the installation! And sometimes co-performs! A quartet! An orchestra!

How do I make tactile contact with the thing called the city? Map-based interaction has often been used. But is there a more natural interaction?

One possible single interaction unit: the traffic light? Every crossroads has traffic lights. Red, yellow, green. What does the traffic light symbolise?

Like the ASC lab's like button: pressed as intuitively as a "like" or a "thanks" button. Intuitively, one (or two) dimensions of interaction. RFID: for each position there are specific axes or parameters.

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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.