# 데이터의 교향곡 Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/banpo-xism-artist-notes-2025-07-20 Type: essay / research note Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) Date: 2025-07-20 ## Full text [A Gemini chat was consulted here; its link is dropped.] Working titles: Competition leads to Homogenisation Against Petit Bourgeois - Early Thoughts The return of the real - city, simulacres, punctum Revealing the way each agent, each individual, lives in the city? Playing the city: revealing, drawing how the individual lives within the city's structure? Each individual, each agent, works toward a particular objective... optimises. But gather all those optimisations, all the individuals' trajectories, and it becomes a kind of comedy? The sum of optimisation leads into an emergent, complex, not necessarily optimal system (the cars crossing Hannam Bridge). Materials: achieving irrationality through the repetition of rational objects, so, materials I can use as rational objects: - Route optimisation, navigation. [A chatbot response pasted here, summarised: superimpose many navigation routes on one screen and let them tangle over time into an unreadable mass of lines, visualising the irony that rational attempts to find the optimal route add up to a more complex, inefficient situation.] - House prices; real-estate registry certificates, contracts, building registers. - Data walls: real-estate prices, stock quotes, traffic volume data and so on. - The education system. - Transit card data, the transfer system (the familiar spoken announcement "hwanseung-imnida", "this is a transfer"). - CCTV screens (control mechanisms). - Receipts; delivery app and kiosk order screens. - QR codes: countless derivative websites (QR codes are generated, and scanning them leads on into further parts of the playing). The navigation map, an example: at first there is nothing, almost just a grid. But as playing continues (tapping buildings), lines between buildings appear. As these lines keep multiplying, the map of Yeongdeungpo is finally drawn. A route API: load several kinds of data at once, public transport, cars and so on. Data walls: real-estate prices, stock quotes, traffic data (?). - the stock exchange ticker board: Yeouido, a stock ticker wall - the departure board of an airport or train station: Yeongdeungpo station, a Solari board; Das Gerede; Gursky, Frankfurt - the control room: the traffic control centre, the disaster and safety situation room Clicking or touching a specific intersection reflects data on the economic activity happening at that intersection on the data wall. For example, a Starbucks: receipts, coffee purchases and so on. For example, an apartment: economic activity such as housing transactions comes up on the surrounding screens. At first it is rational (because each thing stands singly, one by one), but when it becomes enormous and piles up, it makes one visual emergence. Playing means adjusting parameters. How will I handle that parameter adjustment? In the end the direction is something like a symphony of data, a city-data symphony. The city, one huge hyperobject. The economic activity happening there every day. And within it, emergence... The city is beautiful in itself! The semi-lattice, ever-flowing city (Yeongdeungpo) is beautiful in itself! The historic centre is beautiful, the area around Samseong station is beautiful, but Banpo, Dongtan and Ilsan are not beautiful. This Manhattan-like quality: rather than vaguely criticising economic activity, sublimating it. Beautiful activities! Beautiful randomness! Beautiful emergence! Look: you carry on rational activity every single day, but does it not, in the end, make one huge irrationality, one huge semi-lattice, one huge rhizome? Huge "Baemin order!" alerts (from Baedal Minjok, the delivery app). The CCTV-grid aesthetic. CCTV. A huge traffic control centre, a disaster and safety situation room. The huge CCTV aesthetic: the Joker scene. Node-node relationships Apply the same logic as Collective Opinion: make all the edges between all nodes previously (recently) selected in other intersection interactions and the node currently selected at the current intersection. This edge is not just a visual edge. For each edge between that node and every other node: an exploration of what relationship, what semantic relationship, could form. - e.g. fried-chicken shop and housing: a Baemin order - e.g. office building and Starbucks: ? - e.g. school and housing: ? Third places? And of course the shortest-route navigation API is included too: show the navigation route. A symphony of data. --- 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.