# ‘도시’가 아니라 ‘도시 같음’을 그려내야 Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/banpo-xism-artist-notes-2025-07-05 Type: essay / research note Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) Date: 2025-07-05 ## Full text A formal study of the city Visual collage (output): in the end it has to be influenced by Dadaism. The structure called the city. Urban collage: not an orderly form (it can never, ever be an orderly form!) but a hybrid, collaged form. Pinterest: "city collage", or "city + glitch" and the like. Moon Woo-sik, Composition for a Nameless Bridge. Rockefeller Center, urban neurosis (Delirious New York, Manhattanism, Koolhaas). Materials I can use: newspapers and news, images, lines, rhizomes, roots, flow, shapes and shape-textures, figurative compositions and geometric compositions. A formula for form: a parametric understanding of form. And these materials are composed out of combinations of input parameters. Four questions - Formal elements (or output): a sum of parameters. - A sum of parameters plus stochasticity (i.e. it keeps changing even without interaction). - So, in the end, which formal elements appear? - So, in the end, what experience results? The map of Yeongdeungpo: drawing it together, each in a different kind of 3D? Intersections in the city as objet a, positions of eruption? A Lacanian cone folded over every position? Moving from actuality (the ground) towards virtuality the higher into the air you go? Many interpretations are possible. In the end we should not draw "the city"; we should draw "city-likeness". That is why I have to understand the properties of the city properly. The city's languages, signs, Symbolic - traffic lights - road guidance lights (O, X) - road signs (old type, new type) - signs and their referents (no parking, bus-only lane) - street lights What I must make clear: I am not focusing on depicting the appearance of the city itself. Rather, I have to make a system, one that moves autonomously and evolves by itself. I have to successfully depict the city's emergence, its systemic aspect. And interaction has to provide the source of that systemic aspect. Even bowls knocking against each other... that is systemic enough. This kind of emergence is what I need! And I need to practise implementing it, even at a small scale. The properties of a system, the establishment of emergence, the property of self-functioning, automation. Not something forcibly brought in and stuck on, but: when two or more people gather, emergence forms naturally, like the superposition of waves, or like agent-based modelling. Systems and complex patterns are formed by the superposition of simple patterns. The superposition of simple waves. Sparks of Genius: pattern formation (patterns in music, the moire effect). Complex systems: ABM (maximalism via minimalism). DNA patterns. Daily tous les jours: likewise, many users make one harmony. The Yeongdeungpo city-instrument-intersection works the same way. Each intersection plays the role of an agent. The interaction at each intersection naturally makes a parameter set. These parameter sets (a, b, c, d, e) are combined, a few at a time, on each screen, making their own superposed waveforms. One user, one interaction: a piano (one instrument: Mullae-dong is instrument A, Yeouido is instrument B). Many users: emergence, a complex system, a symphony. The increase of dimension The void vs. one user vs. two users vs. many users. Point, line, plane (before interaction vs. a single user vs. inter-user). Or line, plane, 3D. Justified combinatorially: lines gather to become a plane, planes gather to become 3D. Single users gather to make inter-user interaction. (Kengo Kuma's philosophy? Point, line, plane?) Study Sarah Sze too: how did Sarah Sze do it? So, naturally, inter-layer, inter-parameter, inter-user is three-dimensional. Collage: forward, towards a three-dimensional collage! --- 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.