# 화성학과 광기의 반복 Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/banpo-xism-artist-notes-2025-07-24 Type: essay / research note Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) Date: 2025-07-24 ## Full text Making urban structure: making an emergent urban structure through city-playing (on the phone)? 1. A study of harmony, a study of mobile interaction How should I see interaction instrumentally? Two broad directions: harmony, and the electronic instrument. The perspective of harmony Instrumental interaction: when the user plays a 3D photorealistic map on their phone like piano keys... various effects come out on the various surrounding multi-devices. First-order effect: the node's own correspondence. Press an apartment building and an apartment comes up; press a Starbucks building and Starbucks comes up; press an office building and an office building comes up (or a similar immediate, single-node-related, corresponding semantic response). Experientially: it provides an immediate audiovisual effect. Second-order effect: generating edges, connectivity, between the current node and previous nodes. The typical example: showing routes, paths. Shortest paths between the current node and all the other selected nodes, so that urban structure, a graph tissue, gradually forms. The graph is gradually generated (both visually and conceptually, systemically). But the limit of these effects: they see each interaction only as a discrete node click... From the user's position, though, interaction is one continuous act. They might click different nodes at the same time (a chord), or click different nodes in different ways (staccato, legato and so on). A successful instrumental interaction has to reflect this. Especially if the current finger-skating interaction on the map is influenced by the piano, I need much more study of harmony (or melody and rhythm). How do I make instrumental interaction on the map go beyond a combination of quantised node adjustments and become one continuous act of interaction? And how, in response, do the surrounding output screens react, and how do they build emergent behaviour? On sustaining emergence: interaction makes a network, a tissue, a complex system. Then how does the system stay alive afterwards, without interaction? How does it keep living, and keep evolving? The perspective of the electronic instrument The perspective of the Reactable tabletop DJ, of Ableton (Session View), or of the Launchpad. Once you make an interaction, it repeats according to a particular BPM, a particular cycle or loop. How does this differ from the harmonic, piano-like approach? Which suits the work better? (Or additionally) the wave perspective: referring to the description of waves below, how would I build it? 2. A study of object-repetition: how do I make Banpo-Xism collapse step by step? Don't strain to find the objects to repeat; repeat objects that are naturally around (like the vending machines). Yeongdeungpo: "Happy Yeongdeungpo", "People-centred Yeongdeungpo"... start from these catchphrases? "Sights of our neighbourhood". "Getting to know our neighbourhood"... Or happy Banpo-Xism websites: transactions, market prices, education, living zones (how well the Gangnam way of life is furnished: apartment living plus waterfront space plus shopping mall plus education). Start first from catchphrases like these, from happy websites, from petit-bourgeois creeds. And then the repetition of these catchphrases... of these happy websites... repeated almost shamelessly. And on top of this repetition (through the repetition, over the repetition), punctum appears... Existing devices and displays: they are fed their particular content as usual, but it is as if a screw had come loose somewhere (or as if there were too many screws: a mad repetition). And within this mad repetition... a repetitive feedback loop, a feedback-reinforcement interaction? (On top of the mobile map interaction...) A working website, a junk site, junk happiness: designed madly, designed madly and repetitively. The influence of two kinds of interaction: interaction on this website (symbolising limited interaction within the semiotic, the Symbolic), and instrumental interaction on the phone (the return of the Real from outside the Symbolic, the return of punctum). 3. Graphs and emergence: a phase transition happens when E/V > 0.5 (the edge of chaos) How is interaction drawn graphically, structurally? - Each intersection: I1, I2, I3, ... - At each intersection I_j, the set of clicked buildings B_j1, B_j2, ... - And the target building B_ti at the current target intersection I_t. Connections between B_ti and the buildings of all the other intersections: connections between the current node of the current target and the previously selected nodes of every other target. This connectivity: explicitly, routes. Shortest path, shortest public-transport route, shortest car route. As these routes add up, there is nothing at first, then gradually an urban structure, a city map, appears. This was the edge built more explicitly on map-based routes; forms with the same principle but a different surface or appearance (semantic relationships) are equally possible. Showing interaction intuitively as a graph! Question: within graphs organised like this, graphs made of nodes and edges that "came into being" through interaction, how does further emergence happen? 4. Multi-device: correlation between devices. Not mere visual or structural correlation; there has to be an actual feedback loop. This natural feedback loop, being able to design complexity (chaosmos: the edge between order and chaos) even with few rules, is the core of the design. All these rules should be intuitive, experienced right away rather than vague, and at the same time the complexity they produce should be astonishing. --- 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.