# 장소의 악기화, Amplified Characteristics

Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/banpo-xism-artist-notes-2025-06-29
Type: essay / research note
Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤)
Date: 2025-06-29

## Full text

Christian Marclay: Playing Pompidou. But: Playing Pompidou is just mere playing... just a mere experiment... There is no deeper intention or meaning. YDP has to find urban, humanistic meaning.

Marclay's sampling and collage techniques are useful, though. Sampling aesthetics. Interaction-collage, the re-creation of meaning.

Playing each location as an instrument (each location in the city). I play Yeongdeungpo station. I play Mullae-dong. I play Yeouido. If I played Yeouido, how would I play it? Playing wakes the city, grows it, makes it, casts it. Can I convey, together with the playing, the meaning of the city? Some feeling and some meaning at the same time?

From the real to the surreal? Making, co-constructing a poetic, abstracted city. The user's own freedom and flexibility gradually increase. And in the process of making this instrument, semantic interaction plus surrealism are combined within the instrument. Togglers and the like? Units through which some interaction can happen? Collages of those units? Exaggeration, repetition, rhythm-ness. I need to think deeply about these keywords once more.

What does it mean to play an instrument? Which parameters can be made instrumental, which urban parameters? Not simply traffic, roads, buildings, pointy things, objects, but flow. Flow is the focus. The city's night and day. Colour. Each city's character. Endless possibilities... What is needed is artistic interpretation, artistic amplified interpretation, amplified characteristics. Turning places, cities into instruments.

Making a proper instrument that actually works... that is the hardest and most gruelling job of all. Is it not a job that demands the most intuitive (simple is the best) yet provocative action? It functions as an instrument, but it must also be possible as part of semantics, of signification.

Mesh: inspiration from mesh drawing tools? A mesh selector tool, a brush tool.

Feedback: the interaction between the phone and the system? The phone affects the surrounding screens, the city collage, through the system. Conversely, how does this collage affect the phone back?

A connection with street art? It could also feel a bit like graffiti...

Amplified characteristics

Every space in the city has characteristics. Each destination: Yeongdeungpo, Sindorim, Mullae, Dangsan, Yeouido. Each has its own smell. These very intuitive characteristics of the city should appear, be emphasised, be lit artistically. Amplify those particular traits hugely; look at them from an artistic point of view. Amplified characteristics.

A good reference: the TikTok account realmadwolf475, "POV: You go to ___". It amplifies the character of each region in collage form: money, a cat character, stuff, flags, euros (money), all expressed playfully through the cat character.

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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.