# 도시-놀이: 꿈과 같은 초현실적 도시

Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/banpo-xism-artist-notes-2025-06-27
Type: essay / research note
Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤)
Date: 2025-06-27

## Full text

Like making a character...
The city: each intersection. Raising each intersection? Touching the smartphone interface tactilely with your hand... the city grows?
How is it instrumental? Which axes of control? A bit more like a string instrument? Tangible, satisfyingly sticky?
One crossroads modelled in 3D: building heights increase? The business types change?
A bit more speculation? Isn't there something more creative?
The flipping scene of the dream city in Inception. The dimension scene in Interstellar.
Either way, it has to be creative and show future urban dynamics convincingly enough.
The dream city: copying it as it is would be stupid. It has to be done differently, turned into playing.

Intersection, instrument, interaction

Individuals interact at each intersection (scanning a flat RFID chip). That interaction controls specific parameters, instrumentally. Instrumental parameters: a chord element, a temporal element.

Every scene: a 3D scene. A 3D cityscape of the interaction. Finger interaction changes the cityscape, changes the 3D model. From changing building heights to... distortion? Interstellar-like? Superposition? An abstract, sculptural development that at the same time makes sense and is overwhelming. Like making a character. Stacking up. Building the intersection: a kind of construction, a construction of properties, in 3D form. Instrumental interaction. Immediate audiovisual feedback across the other screens? The accelerometer: AR-like interaction, scene view transitions.

Why intersections in Yeongdeungpo? The urban character of crossroads and junctions: the crossing point of two infinite lines (roads), and the dynamics, the interactivity, that take place in it.

Possible combinations of interaction

1. Finger interaction: touching as if playing. Creative, hyper-real, surreal.
2. Accelerometer: the perspective of the 3D scene, as in AR.
3. Potentially: language interaction? Some more GUI?

City and play

Changing and constructing the city comes from play. A Nietzschean play, imagination: Inception. Playing the city is not something possible on a realistic level; it comes from a dreamlike, surreal image of the city. For this surreal aspect, these distorted dimensions, we can take hints from the avant-garde of the 1960s, from very bold architects. What we have to do is take these architects' visions as reference and develop an Interactive-Intersection-as-Instrument: one that lets the city, the intersection, some instrument be played through one or two immediately controllable dimensions of parameters, in combination with endlessly different rhythms (the rhythms at other intersections).

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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.