# 도시 다다이즘 Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/banpo-xism-artist-notes-2025-07-15 Type: essay / research note Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) Date: 2025-07-15 ## Full text I have to become more myself. My colour, my smell has to come through strongly. Verfremdungseffekt, punctum, within the city. My message: spaces outside the Symbolic, spaces outside the petit-bourgeois, Gangnam way of life, torn spaces: punctum, the V-effect, and the formation of chaos, of chaosmos, within them. Speed, ratio, coefficients, differential relations. Catalytic activity, propagation speed, growth rate, evolution, mutation. Self-organisation theory (autopoiesis). Network, graph, topology. The Levy distribution. Complex adaptive systems. Autocatalytic chain reactions, the Nagel-Schreckenberg model (NaSch). City networks, city road networks. Delay plus feedback. Calculus, recurrence relations, scale invariance, self-organised criticality... ENTANGLEMENT: Yiyun Kang. An aesthetic, visual-side reference. Automatic system generation. Explicit lines: node-link relationships, a directed graph. What will people feel? They study the city, they get to feel the city's diversity, they take in a wide range of colours..?? Think of the city as a combination of nodes and edge links? An understanding based on signs and systems (Robert Venturi)? An understanding based on events? Based on chaosmos? Idle spaces? Emergence: where does emergence arise? (Typed with the keyboard in the wrong language mode; decoded.) Things like the vending machine: whimsy, much stronger colours. Completely powerful colours are needed, and they must be transformed and constructed. From Jang Yong-soon's book, as I copied it: the city cannot exist as complete order; it develops by including errors and chaos. It exists as chaosmos, neither chaos, the outside of the city, nor complete order. This is similar to how every human being, entering the order of language from the state of nature, inevitably comes to carry symptoms that were not symbolised. Chaos in the city makes room to breathe under the repression of order. Ambiguous spaces whose function is not fixed (virtual spaces), such as squares, parks and cemeteries, play this role. The contemporary cafe plays it too: it escapes the categories of the traditional cafe, the library, the workplace, the home and the square, and serves as an ambiguous space that belongs nowhere. Yes, let us escape language! Escaping language is the core of Dada. Opening chaosmos through chaos, smashing the grid, Euclidean-ness, petit-bourgeois myths and fantasies, simulacra: that is in fact the centre of the project. Not receiving the connections between ideas as written words, but... a revolt has to rise from some primal force that exists at their root! So it is right to distrust LLMs and AI too. An LLM is even more codified than language; it operates even more inside the Symbolic. This has to be smashed... May 68, under the paving stones, the beach! Dada! Dada!!! Destroy it all, expose the Real. Each feature of the city: not just selecting a "building" and playing it. What matters is what that building is, its functional and formal parameters. Is it an apartment? If it is an apartment, what year was it completed? Is it a motel? Is it a building with a Starbucks on the ground floor? Is it a shopping mall, or a corner shop? And the most important thing is that these various characteristics mix naturally. Chaotic colours, a chaotic feeling: chaosmos. Confusing, yet ordered. The key is tailoring that confusion so it can be taken in well. The American sociologist Ray Oldenburg argued for a "third place", neither home nor work, and this place also functions as a kind of chaos space. The third place opens a gap between zoning and the system of order, creating a small possibility of relaxing and releasing excessive order. This is very similar to the role of objet a in psychoanalysis. Such spaces are free from existing functional distinctions, places where boundaries have blurred. They go beyond even the private-public distinction and play the role of a festival festival festival festival, a Dionysian festival beyond taboo and order. Appropriate chaos, flexible chaos in the city releases the city's rigidity. In spatial structure, the rhizome plays the role of chaos against rigid order. It makes room to breathe within a repressed system of order. CHAOSMOS = CHAOS (death drive, release) + COSMOS (life drive, contraction) Again from the book: in the end, mind, organism, society, economy, city, technology and machine are ways of organising and arranging chaosmos. What this book attempts is a kind of systemics, a systemics of flows and chaosmos. In the end city = mind = economy share the same structure. All of these are actually connected, because they are structures made by infinite chaos and finite cosmos. Such structures go beyond the classical boundary between living beings and machines. The point of Entanglement. We have to rise up against Banpo-Xism, against the cycle, the pendulum motion, of cram school and school, of work and rest. Where does entropy come from? Where does information come from? Information comes from heterogeneity, from a kind of harmony... Criticality, catastrophe theory, power laws, exponential growth. Discontinuity, contingency. This discontinuity and contingency are actualised by "interaction". Like the vending machine idea... natural! Very natural... where do you get ideas like that? A natural spilling out... Vending machines! Repetition, repetition compulsion? Repetition compulsion? Perverse repetitions? Repetitions of features? Where does my smell come from? Painting a yellow scream (noran bimyeong geurigi). Instruments, orchestras, repetitions. Warhol, Gursky, Jacques Tati, Marclay. The moment of splitting! Urban surrealism, urban Dadaism. The moment the Real rises up, bursts out. The repressed... under the paving stones, the beach! Very momentary collapses, splits. Playing the city does not mean playing the Symbolic; it means revealing the Real. Playing chaos, singing chaos, Also sprach Zarathustra. VERFREMDUNGSEFFEKT, Brecht. Retaining walls that have risen up, a kind of deviation. The rejection of Banpo-Xism, the rejection of petit-bourgeoisism, the rejection of Daechi-dong (Seoul's cram-school district). The rejection of the harmonious family, the rejection of the happy family, the rejection of modernism, the rejection of rules and discipline. The return of Gotham, the return of darkness, the return of confusion, the return of the grotesque, the return of genius. A critique of the petit bourgeois: Gerhard Richter? A passage on Richter I copied, closely paraphrased: all these stories reveal the family as a self-destructive facade, and the longing for petit-bourgeois happiness as a deceptive hope. The tragedy is that in almost every case the perpetrator is a family member. Richter seems not to have trusted the family as a safe nest or a place of harmonious happiness for a couple and their children. Rather, through family photographs he stages the deceptive image of an intact middle class, either by referring ambiguously to the tragic background of a motif or by relying on the false epics professionally fabricated in advertising. His paintings generate tension from this dissonance between tragic, imperfect everyday reality and the hopeful utopia of personal happiness. Richter, who experienced almost no stable family life as a child, later mocked and satirised this philistine petit-bourgeois world and exposed its illusions, while at the same time putting petit-bourgeois virtues to apt use in his work. The sociologist Berthold Franke, giving a scholarly assessment of the petit-bourgeois phenomenon, defined the petit bourgeois as someone who takes the social average (Banpo-Xism) as their role model: "He is someone who seeks normality himself; in fact he can be seen as an endangered normality, the incarnation of true ordinariness." Richter put it in exaggerated form in a 1966 text: "I want to be like other people, to act the way other people think, and in any case to behave like them." Disgust for every average, disgust for every pretence, disgust for every customer-service agent, every bourgeois, every Banpo Xi. New confusion, confusion on top of order: feeling the city through irregular interaction instead of order... Urban Dadaism. --- 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.